Dative movement

The term dative movement has been used to refer to the transformation that relates a prepositional indirect-object construction (The girl gave milk to the cat) to a double-object construction (The girl gave the cat milk), especially in English (e.g. Erteschik-Shir 1979).

Comments

Since the transformational analysis is no longer popular, the neutral term dative alternation is now mostly used for the English alternation in question.

Synonyms

• dative shift
• dative transformation
• dativization

References

• Erteshik-Shir, Naomi. 1979. Discourse constraints on dative movement. In: Givón, T. (ed) Discourse and syntax (Syntax and Semantics, 12.) New York/San Francisco/London: Academic Press, 441-467.