He gave it me

[pne]

I think you can say both He gave it me and He gave me it (in the sense of He gave it to me), so word order is not the only thing marking theta roles (if I got my term right).

Some combination of context, typical roles, and animacy hierarchy? Vestiges of a dative/accusative distinction in pronouns, rather than being lumped together as "objective case"?

On the other hand, you can say (well, I can say) He gave me the book but not *He gave the book me.

Or am I (in finding He gave it me grammatical) transferring from German, where the typical word order is Er gab es mir? (Er gab mir es would probably be grammatical, but sounds quite strange to me stylistically. But with a noun, the order would usually be like that: Er gab mir das Buch. Er gab das Buch mir sounds unusual, perhaps if you wanted to emphasise that it was me to whom he gave the book, but even then you could express that with the more usual word order.)

Comments

[animate-mush.livejournal.com]

"He gave me it" is usually prescriptively forbidden - I know I've heard parents "correct" their children. To me, it has a slight oddness, probably stemming from prosodic considerations, since sentence final constituents need to be stressed, and "it" submits to such treatment only reluctantly. But it's certainly not non-standard by my intuitions at least.

"He gave it me" does feel contrastively non-standard or archaic. I can't make any claims about its attestation in contemporary English (has anybody tried google?) but Shakespeare definitely uses it. The quote I have in mind is from A Midsummer Night's Dream:

Have you the lion's part written?
I pray you - if it be, give it me,
For I am slow of study

If I had to guess, I would hypothesize that it is a more prosodically acceptable variant on "give me it" and therefore restricted to cases where the prosodic issue arises, rather than being a generally accessible option. For instance, I do not think that speakers who have (or had) "give it me" would also have "give the book me."

I think somebody should write a grant to get money to build a time machine and go back and run some 16th century perceptual experiments. Who's with me?