ABSTRACT
This short paper, which makes an important empirical contribution but is not widely available, presents new data from Yaqui on the status of double object constructions in the language. The authors show that the double accusative construction in Yaqui is determined purely lexically. There are no dative shift–type alternations; the availability of the construction is dependent on which verb is used. They show, however, that like the English construction, the accusative goal argument functions as the direct object for processes of passivization and causativization. Further, accusative goals in Yaqui must be animate, unlike dative goals. The authors argue that in order to capture the crosslinguistic similarities between alternating (English) and non-alternating (Yaqui, Warlpiri) double accusative constructions, a theory of grammar with mapping statements relating a thematic/semantic representation and a syntactic representation is necessary. In this way, the analogue of ‘dative movement’ can be implemented in the same way in English and in languages where a syntactic movement solution is implausible.
