Comparing categories and constructions crosslinguistically (again): The diversity of ditransitives

A fundamental problem in typology and universals research is the identification of linguistic categories across languages. The same problem arises in the documentation of a particular language, since the writer of the grammar almost always uses grammatical terminology used for describing other languages, typically terms from the Western grammatical tradition used to describe Western European languages. Sometimes this seems to be a mere terminological matter: finding the right names for grammatical phenomena in one language or another. But this “mere terminological matter” is in fact a deep theoretical issue. What sorts of categories are universal? What is the basis for crosslinguistic comparison? Should we only describe the grammar of a language “on its own terms”, and what exactly does that mean? The issue is so fundamental that any typological analysis has to confront it; and it has led to a lively debate about the nature of crosslinguistic categories (among others: Dryer 1997; Croft 2001, 2005, 2009; Evans & Osada 2005a, b; Haspelmath 2007, 2010a, b, 2011; Newmeyer 2007, 2010). Such is the case with Studies in ditransitive constructions. It reports the results of the project on Ditransitive Constructions of the World’s Languages, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and based at the Department of