VERB-INDIRECT OBJECT-DIRECT OBJECT and VERB-DIRECT OBJECT-INDIRECT OBJECT

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the study of constituent order in ditransitive constructions by means of a variationist analysis based on spoken Spanish from Madrid. We analyze the variable position of objects in ditransitive clauses. We identify two variants: (1) Verb-Direct Object-Indirect Object and (2) Verb-Indirect Object-Direct Object. We include in the envelope of variation ditransitive constructions in which the DO is expressed by a noun phrase (sometimes preceded by the marker a) and the IO is expressed by means of a prepositional phrase preceded by a ‘to’. The percentage of V-IO-DO constructions in our data is 33%. The results of our statistical analyses show that V-IO-DO is significantly conditioned by the following linguistic factors: grammatical person of the IO, type of DO, and verb type. Unlike previous studies, we find that information flow factors do not have a significant effect on this word order variation. Considering its recurrent usage patterns in the discourse, we identify the verb decir ‘to say’ and the constructions it occurs in as the likely source and spread of the V-IO-DO order.