The information structure of ditransitives
Adele Eva Goldberg · Pragmatics & beyond. New series · 2014
This chapter argues that information structure plays a critical role in explaining the ditransitive construction’s distribution, scope properties, and interaction with long-distance dependency constructions. Specifically, since the recipient argument is a secondary topic and backgrounded in discourse, it tends to have wide scope over the theme argument and also tends to resist extraction when combined with long-distance dependency constructions. An alternative, the to-dative, is favored in these circumstances, since it has a more appropriate information structure.