I'm told

[Cynthia Allen]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Jacob Baltuch wrote:
 
>So any language in which accusative & dative collapse
>together (both nouns and pronouns) and both direct and
>indirect objects are bare NPs in certain constructions
>would be liable to undergo this?
 
I believe that in English what was crucial was not the fact that both NPs
were bare, but that the order became fixed, with the bare repicient always
directly after the verb.  The collapse of the accusative/dative distinction
did not immediately result in the introduction of the indirect passive.
The loss of the accusative/dative distinction happened in most dialects by
the early part of the 13th century, but no genuine indirect passives are to
be found at this time.  There followed a period of about 125 years in which
although the recipient and the were unmarked, they could occur in either
order-either 'he gave the king a gift' (the only order possible in ModE) or
'he gave a gift the king'.  (So it is not true, as is often believed, that
the recipient and themealways had to be distinguised by either case,
preposition, or word order, but this is not too surprising given that
ambiguity is hardly likely to result, since the recipient is normally human
and the theme is normally inanimate).
 
Anyway, the modern order became more and more dominanant (there are figures
in my book showing this) and eventually it became the only possibility.
Immediately afterwards (late 14th century), the indirect passives appear
because grammatically, the recipient is indistinguishable from the theme.
 
>
>On the other hand I seem to remember that Japanese has
>direct and indirect object take different postpositions
>(-(w)o vs. -ni if I remember correctly) and yet has
>indirect passives.
 
I am not competent to comment on the Japanese facts, but will only say that
I am not claiming that it is impossible for a language to have an indirect
passive without formal identity of the recipient and the theme-only that in
a language like English in which only direct objects passivized originally,
it is possible for the indirect passive to arise when former indirect
objects are reanalysed as direct.
 
Cynthia Allen
 
Cynthia Allen
Linguistics, Arts Faculty
Australian National University
Canberra, ACT 0200
Australia