Reviewed by Michael W Morgan, Addis Ababa University

This book is a welcome addition to the discussion of ditransitivity that discusses the topic in the theoretical framework of role and reference grammar and presents a typological survey of a corpus drawn from 100 languages. It is doubly welcome in that Carmen Conti includes the entire corpus of ditransitive examples as an appendix. In the body of the text, all example sentences are glossed in Spanish, but the examples in the appended corpus follow the original sources: except for three languages in Spanish, all of them are glossed and translated into English.

The book consists of a short introduction and four chapters, as well as two appendices, a bibliography, and indices. In the ‘Introduction’ (10–15), C gives three objectives of her study: (i) the description and classification of the markers used to encode recipient and beneficiary, (ii) an analysis of their morphosyntactic codification, e.g. whether they are direct or indirect objects and central or peripheral arguments, and (iii) generalization of the patterns of codification of recipient and beneficiary when they act as the second objects of transitive verbs.

Ch. 1 (16–31) introduces ditransitivity and discusses verbs of transference and the roles of receiver and beneficiary. Ch. 2 (32–74) presents the languages of the corpus and discusses how they mark and codify receiver and beneficiary: nominal affix, full and clitic adpositions, relational nouns, determiners and possessive pronouns, complement clauses, verbal affixes (including applicatives, causals, benefactives, directives, ventives, benefactive anaphora, and honorific), co-verbs, chaining models, and double (multiple) marking.

Ch. 3 (75–133) discusses constructions with double objects, which are present in thirty-two languages in the corpus, with particular attention to the ways in which direct and indirect objects (undergoer and recipient, respectively) are distinguished in the languages of the corpus. Ch. 4 (134–83) treats applicative constructions (found in twenty-six languages in the corpus), which often serve to convert a peripheral object into a grammatically central one.

End matter includes a ‘Bibliography’ (184–94), including descriptive grammars for the languages in the corpus and a wide range of theoretical discussions relating to ditransitivity. Appendix one (195–97) is a discussion of the method for choosing the corpus (following Rijkhoff and Bakker 1998), and appendix two (198–259) presents the corpus of 330 examples from ninety-seven languages, excluding Spanish, English, and (inexplicably) Aymara. Finally, there is an English-Spanish index of language names (260–61) that does not cross reference examples used in the body of the book, and a topic index (262–64).

REFERENCE

Rijkhoff, Jan, and Dik Bakker. 1998. Language sampling. Linguistic Typology 2. 263–314.