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Secundative language
Dative shift
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Introduction
From time to time I find myself translating something into English and often my first draft seems a little stilted or wooden. Even though it is perfectly grammatical, it just does not read right, and so I look for more idiomatic ways of saying the same things. Sometimes this reveals peculiarities in English of which I had not really been aware. This piece is about something that I came across recently, but had not before thought strange.
A flexible construction
In English we are used to the idea that there are verbs (known as "ditransitive verbs") which can take both a direct and indirect object. Because of this our language is described as indirective and all the other Indo-European languages which I have studied are indirective too. However, English is more flexible than most in the way it handles indirect objects. Let us consider this sentence:
- John gave a book to Mary.
We could also say: - John gave Mary a book.
We still regard Mary as an indirect object, but the word is now marked as such by its position in the sentence, rather than by a preposition. So far, so good. However, what happens if we turn the sentence round and put the verb in the passive voice? We get:
- A book was given to Mary by John.
Now this is grammatical, but it is not what we should normally say. We are much more likely to put it this way: - Mary was given a book by John.
The indirect object has been promoted to the position of subject. In French and the other Romance languages I have studied, you cannot do this. It is possible in Dutch, but the auxiliary verb used to form the passive voice is different. See item 4 in this section of the Wiktionary entry on krijgen.[1] So the Dutch are saying:
- Mary got given a book by John.
This might not be regarded as good style in English, but we do say things such as:
- The couple got married, or
- The dog got fed twice a day.
A touch of the secundative?
Realizing how we play about with these constructions in English made me reflect that perhaps I was wrong to think of indirect objects as being in the dative case, as my years of studying Latin had taught me to do. The way we form sentences with the passive voice of a verb suggests that there is a different kind of grammatical logic here. Some languages are described as secundative, because they deal with the objects of ditransitive verbs differently from the way indirective languages treat them, and it seems to me, and to some writers on linguistics too, that in a sentence such as Mary was given a book by John English is acting like a secundative language.
Secundative languages treat the recipient as the principal object and the thing received ("theme") as a subordinate object, whereas with indirective languages it is the other way round. It is a different way of looking at the world, just as speakers of ergative-absolutive languages such as Basque look at the world differently from the way we who speak nominative-accusative languages do.
The more I discover about my own language, the more I come to realize how the complexities and subtleties of different languages create difficulties for people trying to learn an alien tongue, and I am encouraged to be tolerant with the students I help, when they use strange constructions or fail to distinguish between two somewhat similar concepts.
Notes -
I am not entirely sure the example given illustrates the point made. There is a better one in the Dutch version of Wiktionary (See item 3): Hij kreeg een prijs uitgereikt. - He was given a prize or He got given a prize, as we might say in more informal English.
UPDATE: I have now edited the Wiktionary entry, using this example. 1/18
Posted July 2017
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