OE Ditransitive Verbs of the NP + PP type: Visser’s Typology Revisited

Magdalena Charzyńska-Wójcik

Magdalena Charzyńska-Wójcik The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Faculty of Humanities

Keywords: Old English; verbal Cases; prepositional ditransitive verbs; complementation

Abstract

The paper is devoted to Old English prepositional ditransitive verbs of the NP+PP type and aims at re-examining Visser’s (1963-73) typology of OE ditransitives. It is shown that Visser’s classification is insufficient as it recognises only two types of NP+PP ditransitives, namely ACC+PP and DAT+PP, while OE data exhibit more than two variants of the NP+PP construction. In particular, OE prepositional ditransitive verbs fall into three basic types, corresponding to the three verbal Cases, i.e. ACC+PP, DAT+PP and GEN+PP. Additionally, the ACC+PP type falls into two subtypes differentiated by the Ѳ-role assignment to the two arguments so that the PP can either represent the Goal or the Theme argument. In effect, there are four types of prepositional ditransitives of the NP+PP type in OE. The types are derivable on theoretical grounds from the available Goal and Theme types, a fact which reveals that OE ditransitives do not constitute a haphazard set of attested combinations but they form a system governed by an underlying principle, namely the availability of an object type for a particular Ѳ-role is not tied up to a combination in which it appears but it is to be understood as a general availability of the object type in any ditransitive combination. This is to be understood as a property of the system of ditransitives rather than of a complementation pattern of a particular verb.

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