Frontmatter -- Preface -- Contents -- List of abbreviations -- Part 1: The nature of ditransitive arguments: the contribution of diachrony -- 1. How do ditransitives change? -- 2. Roles and grammatical relations in synchrony and diachrony: the case of the indirect object -- Part 2: Ditransitive verbs and construction alternation -- 3. The spread of the ad construction in Merovingian Latin: identifying semantic paths in the domain of ditransitives -- 4. Old Italian ditransitive constructions: between alternation and change -- 5. The emergence of the dative alternation in Dutch: towards the establishment of a horizontal link -- 6. Attraction and differentiation in the history of the English dative and benefactive alternations -- 7. The ditransitive alternation in the history of German: the case of verkaufen ('sell') -- Part 3: Ditransitives between stability and further developments -- 8. The diachrony of ditransitives in Vedic Sanskrit -- 9. Passives of ditransitives: the gradual rise of a Recipient passive in Italian -- 10. 'Hit' semantics and physical sensations: on the development of spontaneous event constructions with Spanish dar 'give' -- Subject Index