Ditransitive constructions: What sets Brazilian Portuguese apart from other Romance languages?

The aim of this paper is to discuss whether a particular diachronic change in the expression of indirect objects (IOs) in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) has set this language
apart from other Romance languages. Since the 19th century, BP has been generalizing the use of the preposition para ‘to’ in ditransitive sentences with verbs of
movement, transfer and creation. Moreover, the morphological counterpart of the
dative argument in the 3rd person (the clitic lhe(s)) has been replaced by other strategies, while in European Portuguese (EP), IOs in the same contexts are introduced by
the dummy preposition a and can always alternate with lhe(s). According to Torres
Morais (2007), these IOs in EP are dative arguments introduced by an applicative
head, as also argued by Cuervo (2003) for Spanish, and Diaconescu & Rivero (2007)
for Romanian. In this paper, I will propose that ditransitive sentences in BP have
a different structural representation from other Romance languages, given that it
cannot express dative case in the 3rd person anymore, nor via functional prepositions, nor by the clitic lhe(s). Consequently, I propose that the IOs in BP should be
introduced via a p head, based on the proposals of Svenonius (2003; 2004), Wood
(2012) and the i* single argument introducer proposal by Wood & Marantz (2017).