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More than meets the eye: Toward a reassessment of Old English double accusatives

Paper · 2025 · Juan G. Vázquez González

Summary

The paper revisits a neglected Old English construction, the Nominative-Accusative-Accusative (ACC-ACC) ditransitive. In it, both the recipient-like and the theme-like object carry accusative case, which typologists call neutral alignment. Because it is so rare, earlier work by Wülfing and Visser treated it as marginal, and some doubted it existed at all. The author queried the Dictionary of Old English Corpus (DOEC) and ran targeted follow-up searches in the Microfiche Concordance. This raised the evidence to 30 verb types and roughly 86–87 tokens; the paper reports both counts. Within Diachronic Construction Grammar, the verbs are sorted bottom-up into verb classes and conceptual domains, summarized in a semantic map, and organized along a lexicality-schematicity hierarchy. The construction appears in early and late Old English, in several dialects and across varied text types. Interlinear glosses of Latin show glossers choosing ACC-ACC even where Latin did not dictate it, which supports its native status. The work is a step toward reconstructing Proto-Germanic argument structure.

Key points

  • Data come from DOEC (Healey et al., 2022) plus the Microfiche Concordance. The result is 30 verb types, adding 18 types and 52 tokens to Visser's (1963) list of 10 types and 32 tokens.
  • The paper contrasts three Old English alignment types:
    • indirect: DAT-ACC / ACC-DAT, the most productive and the source of the Modern English ditransitive;
    • secundative: ACC-GEN;
    • neutral: ACC-ACC.
    • DAT-GEN shows tripartite alignment.
  • Besides speech-act verbs and metaphorical transfer (e.g. gelæran ræd 'give advice'), ACC-ACC also encodes:
    • theme-recipients and beneficiaries;
    • more rarely, theme-goals and maleficiaries.
  • Attestation covers West Saxon, Mercian, Northumbrian and Kentish. It spans four of the six Helsinki Corpus text categories: statutory, non-imaginative narration, imaginative narration and religious instruction.
  • The research was funded by the MAUD project (PID2023-149762NB-I00), which aims at a Universal Dependencies treebank of Old English and zero-shot transfer to Gothic.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Case frames are labeled by alignment type (indirect, secundative, neutral, tripartite) rather than by raw case sequence, so rare surface patterns still slot into a small typological grid.
  • I2. A lexicality-schematicity hierarchy runs from individual verbs up to verb classes and then conceptual domains, so each verb is classified at several levels of abstraction at once.
  • I3. Roles are grouped bottom-up from attested tokens, and the inventory widens beyond plain recipient to beneficiary, maleficiary and theme-goal.
  • I4. Nativeness is tested by comparing glosses with their Latin source: if translators pick a pattern the source did not force, that choice shows the pattern is genuine and not a copy of the source.
  • I5. Robustness of a rare pattern is argued from spread across period, dialect and genre rather than raw frequency, and the author admits the corpus was found incidentally while searching for something else.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): Ditransitive frames could carry an alignment tag mapping each surface slot to recipient or theme, so double-object and prepositional variants resolve to the same who-gave-what-to-whom roles.
  • I2 (world): Compiled verb knowledge could store each verb at its specific, class and domain levels, so unseen verbs fall back to their class's argument structure explainably.
  • I3 (frames): VerbNet-based role labels for second objects could distinguish beneficiary from maleficiary (e.g. "cost him a fortune"), which matters for who gains or loses in the story world.
  • I4 (learn): Silver data from translated or LLM-generated text could be checked the same way, flagging constructions that merely mirror the source as artifacts rather than learning signal.
  • I5 (learn): Self-induced repair rules for rare constructions could be accepted only when supported across multiple genres or sources, with recall limits of the mining query recorded explicitly.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,379 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 250 works

Cite

Cite as Juan G. Vázquez González. 2025. More than meets the eye: Toward a reassessment of Old English double accusatives. ExELL (Explorations in English Language and Linguistics) 13.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.51558/2303-4858.2025.13.1.56

@inproceedings{gonzalez2025more,
  title = {{More than meets the eye: Toward a reassessment of Old English double accusatives}},
  author = {Juan G. Vázquez González},
  booktitle = {ExELL (Explorations in English Language and Linguistics) 13},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.51558/2303-4858.2025.13.1.56},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.51558/2303-4858.2025.13.1.56}
}

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