THE INDIRECT OBJECT CONSTRUCTION IN ENGLISH - AN INFORMATIONAL APPROACH

This paper is based on the findings of a corpus-based study of contemporary Australian English. It is argued that ''dative alternation'' (the typical association between indirect object sentences and sentences containing a prepositional phrase with to or for) cannot be satisfactorily accounted for by appealing solely to such semantic/pragmatic notions as ''affectedness,'' ''indirect-objectiness,'' and ''iconic distance.'' Central to an understanding of such alternation are informational factors. The influence of the central informational variable of ''accessibility'' is examined, along with that of the related variables of end-weight, pronounhood, and definiteness, and relevant frequencies from the corpus are presented. The indirect object and prepositional constructions are noted to contrast in terms of the sharpness with which the NPs representing ''receiver'' and ''entity'' are differentiated within them.