Ditransitives and benefactives in Lamaholot

This paper provides a description and analysis of the ditransitive and benefactive alternations in Lamaholot. The ditransitive alternation is a non-productive verb alternation where one and the same verb of giving, telling, teaching, or showing appears in prepositional-recipient and ditransitive constructions. By contrast, the benefactive alternation is a productive verb alternation in which a transitive verb profiling an action done for the sake of another participant is used in benefactive serial verb and benefactive constructions. Although the semantic differences between the two alternating constructions of each type of verb alternation seem unclear, there is an obvious syntactic difference between them. A theme NP bears the primary object grammatical relation in prepositional-recipient constructions, while a recipient NP does so in ditransitive constructions; a patient NP is in primary object grammatical relation in benefactive serial verb constructions, whereas a recipient-beneficiary NP attains such status in benefactive constructions. In other words, these two alternations have the shared syntactic function of realigning the primary object grammatical relation from one argument to another. This study also showed that, although ditransitive and demonstrative constructions are functional equivalents of applicative constructions, they differ according to the syntactic status of non-applied objects. A non-applied theme NP still counts as a grammatical argument in ditransitive constructions, but a non-applied patient NP does not play such a role in benefactive constructions.