The aim of the present study was to investigate the acquisition of ditransitive structures beyond production. We conducted an elicitation task (production) and a picture-sentence matching task measuring accuracy and response times (comprehension). We examined German five-to seven-year-old typically developing children and an adult control group. Our data showed quasi-perfect performance in comprehension in adults and in those children who had already mastered ditransitives productively. However, children who had not yet mastered the production of ditransitives showed comprehension abilities preceding production abilities. Unlike adults, in the comprehension task children did not react explicitly before the end of the auditory stimulus.

It has been observed that a subset of dative verbs that can express causation of possession such as cwu- ‘give’, ceykongha- ‘offer’ and cikupha- ‘pay’ may be found in the double accusative frame as well as in the DAT(ive)-ACC(usative) frame in Korean. These verbs contrast with transfer of possession verbs such as kennay- ‘hand’ and phal- ‘sell’ and verbs of sending and throwing, which are found in the DAT-ACC frame only. This paper presents a meaning-based account of the limited productivity of the dative/accusative alternation in Korean dative verbs. Building on Croft et al. (2001) and Levin (2004, 2008b), I argue that the semantic classes of dative verbs form an implicational hierarchy pure caused possession > transfer of possession > caused motion, which ranks verbs in terms of the degree of the compatibility with a caused possession event type. I suggest three criteria for compatibility between verb meaning and constructional meaning and show that the analysis of verb–construction pairings proposed here, when combined with an account of variation, provides a unified explanation for verb distribution patterns observed for ditransitive constructions within and across languages and the morphosyntactic expression of recipients of dative verbs in Korean. It accounts for the limited productivity of the dative/accusative alternation in dative verbs in Korean as a consequence of choosing the cut-off point at the highest end of this hierarchy, thus explaining why only the verb class that is most compatible with the caused possession event type, i.e. pure caused possession verbs, may be used ditransitively.

This study provides a linguistic perspective on the structure and the interpretation of a key historical narrative in Umpithamu (a Pama-Nyungan language of Cape York Peninsula, Australia), against the background of a larger corpus of narrative texts in Umpithamu. The analysis focuses on the role of participant tracking devices in the macro-structure of the narrative, and the role of case marking in the build-up of narrative motifs. It is argued not only that marked types of participant tracking serve to mark the boundaries of episodes, as often noted in the literature, but also that some types have additional functions within episodes, which leads to a proposal for refinement of Fox's (1987) Principle of Morphosyntactic Markedness. On a micro-structural level, it is shown how a rare system of case marking is used by the narrator to construe white–Aboriginal interactions as events in which the Aboriginal participants experience an extreme lack of control.The first author would like to thank Mrs. Florrie Bassani and Ms. Joan Liddy, who so patiently taught him about their language, their life, and their history, and Bruce Rigsby, who introduced him to the Lamalama people and generously shared his earlier recordings of Umpithamu and his vast knowledge of Princess Charlotte Bay languages. Fieldwork on Umpithamu was sponsored by the Fund for Scientific Research-Flanders, which funded two research stays at the University of Melbourne, and the Australian Department of Communication, IT and the Arts (DCITA), which funded another fieldtrip. Many thanks to Nick Evans and the Department of Linguistics in Melbourne for hosting the first author's stays, and to Clair Hill for organizing the DCITA grant. A previous version of this article was presented at the 2nd European Workshop on Australian Aboriginal Languages in Somlószőlős, and at a workshop on Australian Aboriginal Narrative at the Max Planck Institut für Psycholinguistik. We would like to thank the members of the audience, especially Nick Enfield, Nick Evans, Clair Hill, Judit Horváth, Danièle Klapproth, Stephen Levinson, Bill McGregor, Adam Saulwick, Gunter Senft, Peter Sutton, and Michael Walsh, for very useful comments. We are also grateful to the reviewers and the editor for very detailed comments on a previous version.