On the Double-object Construction

However, while the range of syntactic structures which might be assigned to these sentences is limited, it is by no means obvious what the correct structure is, or even if there is in fact just one. Be this as it may, we will assume here that the the double-object construction is subject to the same constraints as lexical argument structures in general. Using x to symbolize a lexical head, y a complement, and z a specifier (required to complete a “lexical predication”), the structures projected by basic lexical elements (heads) are defined in terms of just two relations—Head-Complement, and Specifier-Head. These define the elementary configuration types set out in (2), to which lexical argument structures are, by hypothesis, limited. Fundamentally, a head x is classified according to whether it takes a complement, a specifier, both or neither: