CHANGE IN POSSESSION AND LOCATION: A CROSS-LINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE ON THE DITRANSITIVE CONSTRUCTION

The present article demonstrates that the Japanese clausal structure with ni- and o-marked NPs in the object position is identifiable as a ditransitive construction with two major sense types: CHANGE-IN-POSSESSION and CHANGE-IN-LOCATION SENSES, and it points out that those sense types are cross-linguistically associated with ditransitive constructions in different languages like English and Ainu. It further argues that the association is motivated by the fact that the sense types largely correspond to basic or prototypical 'human interaction' and 'object manipulation' (Tuggy 1998) with three participants.