This article presents an explanation for a cross-linguistic gap observed by Anna Siewierska: morphologically unmarked indirect objects may alternate with prepositional marking in what is sometimes called a 'dative' or 'prepositional-dative' ditransitive frame, but never with actual dative case marking. 'Dative', to the extent it alternates with accusative, is always expressed as a preposition. I show firstly that German, which has a robust dative case paradigm, also displays a double object alternation in which the erstwhile dative DP occurs in a prepositional phrase, meaning both accusative (in English) and dative (in German) indirect objects alternate with prepositional encoding. I construct an analysis in which the the indirect object may be generated as either a DP (which receives dative in German and accusative in English) or a PP in the same theta position. This characterization of the double object alternation does not admit an alternation between dative and accusative case on the indirect object, capturing Siewierska's generalization. The analysis also extends to 'symmetric' passive languages, in which either object in the double object construction can be raised to subject in the passive. Some current perspectives on this phenomenon make such languages exceptions to Siewierska's generalization, but not the analysis proposed here.

This paper analyzes the morphosyntactic variation in past counterfactuals with modal verbs in Pomerano, a Low German variety spoken in Brazil. The variation concerns (i) the highest verb (temporal auxiliary or modal verb), (ii) the morphological form of the temporal auxiliary (blocking of tense and/or person agreement), (iii) the frequently unexpected position of the modal verb (verb clusters in the CP-domain), and (iv) the overall number of verbs (syntactic doubling and/or PF-insertion). Analyzing more than 6,000 translated sentences, scope rivalry between the temporal auxiliary and the modal verb proves to be the major catalyst of an intriguing instance of language variation and change. The derivation of the extant variants grants us a privileged view of the clausal architecture of Pomerano-including cases of derivational misfiring-as well as of more general processes of clause formation.