“May Depend on Me Sending It You”

Abstract

In present-day standard English, verbs licensing two objects with a theme and a recipient usually allow for variation in word order between (1) I gave my sister a book, and (2) I gave a book to my sister. The former is considered the canonical word order: “[i]f both objects are present, the indirect object normally comes before” (Quirk et al. 1985:726), but with two pronominal objects the prepositional pattern like (2) is “by far the most frequent” variant (Biber et al. 1999:929). Historically, there has long been a third syntactic variant with a non-prepositional indirect object after the direct object: (3) she gave it me. With two pronominal objects this order “seems always to have been the rule” (Visser 1963:I.623), yet the sequence in (3) has gradually become restricted to linguistic contexts with two pronominal objects and to dialect use in certain varieties of British English (Yáñez-Bouza & Denison 2015). Denison (1998:239) observes that examples like (3) are “sufficient for that order to be accounted acceptable standard” in nineteenth-century English, while Poutsma (1914-1929:I.154) claims that in the early twentieth century “the indirect object almost invariably stands first,” and that with pronominal objects it is “not always” the case that the word order in (3) is preferred. The timing of change is crucial. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the publication of numerous grammars laying down rules about correct and incorrect English. Bearing in mind that normative rules have brought about change in the historical development of certain morphological and syntactic features, this paper aims to shed light on whether early grammarians were aware of syntactic variation in the double object construction, whether they were aware of regional variation, and whether they played a role in the suppression of variability concerning the pattern illustrated in (3).