 | Ditransitive verb: Encyclopedia II - Ditransitive verb - English usage
Ditransitive verb - English usage
English has a number of generally ditransitive verbs, such as give and grant, and many transitive verbs that can take an additional argument (commonly a beneficiary or target of the action), such as pass, read, bake, etc.:
He gave Mary ten dollars.
He passed Paul the ball.
Jean read him the books.
She is baking him a cake.
English grammar allows for these sentences to be written alternately with a preposition (to or for):
He gave ten dollars to Mary.
Jean read the books to/for him., etc.
The latter form is grammatically correct in every case, but in some dialects the former (without a preposition) is considered ungrammatical, or at least unnatural-sounding, when both objects are pronouns (as in He gave me it).
Sometimes one of the forms is perceived as wrong for idiosyncratic reasons (idioms tend to be fixed in form) or the verb simply dictates one of the patterns and excludes the other:
Give a break to me (grammatical, but always realized as Give me a break)
He introduced Susan his brother (usually becomes He introduced his brother to Susan)
In certain dialects of English, many verbs not normally treated as ditransitive are allowed to take a third argument that shows a beneficiary, generally of an action performed for oneself.
Let's catch us some fish. (some fish for us)
Again, this usage is idiomatic and therefore arbitrary, learnt only with experience.
Ditransitive verb - Passive voice
Many ditransitive verbs have a passive voice form which can take a direct object. Contrast the active and two forms of the passive:
Active:
Jean gave the books to him.
Passive:
The books were given to him by Jean.
He was given the books by Jean.
Ditransitive verb - Attributive ditransitive verbs
There is a different kind of ditransitive verbs, where the two objects are semantically an entity and a quality, a source and a result, etc. These verbs attribute one object to the other. In English, make, name, appoint, turn into and others are examples:
- The state of New York made Hillary Clinton a Senator.
- I will name him Galahad.
Other related archivesDechticaetiative language, Morphosyntactic alignment, accusative, accusative case, active, case, dative case, ergative, grammar, grammatical case, idioms, objects, passive voice, preposition, subject, transitive verbs, verb
 Adapted from the Wikipedia article "English usage", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki |
