Dechticaetiative language

A dechticaetiative language is a language in which the indirect objects of ditransitive verbs are treated like the direct objects of monotransitive verbs. Etymologically, the first morpheme of the term comes from Greek dekhomai "to take, receive"; the second is obscure, but it is remotely possible it derives from kaitoi "further, indeed". The term was first introduced by Dr. Edward L. Blansitt, Jr. A more current term for the same phenomenon is secundative language.

Ditransitive verbs have two arguments other than the subject: a patient that undergoes the action and a recipient or beneficiary that receives the patient (see thematic role). In a dechticaetiative language, the recipient of a ditransitive verb is treated in the same way as the single object of a monotransitive verb, and this syntactic category is called primary object. The patient of a ditransitive verb is treated separately and called secondary object.

In dechticaetiative languages with passive constructions, passivation promotes the primary object to subject.

Most dechticaetiative languages are found in Africa, but English arguably contains dechticaetiative constructions, traditionally referred to as dative shift. For example, the passive of the sentence John gave Mary the ball is Mary was given the ball by John, in which the recipient rather than the patient is promoted to subject. This is complicated by the fact that some dialects of English may promote either the recipient (Mary) or the patient (the ball) argument to subject status, and for these dialects The ball was given Mary by John (meaning that the ball was given to Mary) is also well-formed.

See also

• Object (grammar)
• Dative
• Ergativity
• Ditransitive verb
• Morphosyntactic alignment

References

• Trask, R. L., A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics (1993), Routledge, ISBN 0-415-08628-0