Old Persian ditransitive constructions

Old Persian distinguishes two types of ditransitive constructions: the genitive ditransitive construction (see example 1) and the double accusative ditransitive construction The differences between these constructions have been observed in previous studies (Meillet and Benveniste 1931; Kent 1953; Schmitt 2004), but they have not been explored in depth. This study considers the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, morphological, and information structural restrictions on genitive ~ accusative alternation as the indirect object in order to understand the factors that condition the choice between the ditransitive constructions available. Due caution, however, should be exercised as far as OP material is concerned, since our understanding of OP linguistic features is dependent on a limited corpus. A constructional analysis of OP data shows a alignment split (“different constructions under different conditions”, cf. Haspelmath 2014): the two ditransitive constructions of OP can be regarded as two independent argument structure constructions characterized by distinct pragmatic profiles associated with somewhat different meanings.