Diagnosing double object constructions in Bangla/Bengali

This paper examines whether the complex paradigm of patterns reported for ditransitive verbs in Japanese by Miyagawa (1997) and Miyagawa and Tsujioka (2004) might appear in another genetically unrelated but typologically similar SOV scrambling language, Bangla/Bengali. A striking parallelism is found in the two languages, which adds strength to the proposal in Miyagawa (1997) and Miyagawa and Tsujioka (2004) that certain languages allow for variation in the underlying projection of Themes and Locative Goals and there is no fully fixed, single structuring of the lower arguments of ditransitive verbs. Such conclusions about the base forms of double object constructions are shown to have potentially broader implications bearing on the Universal Base Hypothesis. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.