>Wikipedia is kind enough to have an article on dechticaetiative
>languages, <
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dechticaetiative_language>. By
>the looks of things, they treat indirect objects the same way as they
>treat direct objects of verbs with no indirect object. that is, (I
>think) they're the direct object/indirect object equivalent of
>subject/object ergative languages. Something like: ...
>
> I threw the baby his bottle.
> I threw his bottle.
>
>where "the baby" (IO) and "his bottle" (DO) both appear to be taking the
>same spot in the sentence, and thus both "marked" in the same way. That
>seems relatively convincing, but having skipped most of this thread I
>knew nothing about them till I started writing this message ... I would
>suppose arguments against English's dechticaetiativity (bwahaha!) would
>go something along the lines of: "his bottle" is being marked in the
>same way in both phrases, as the last non-prepositional noun phrase in
>the sentence. Paul's observation that English can also do it differently
>as "I threw the baby's bottle to him" probably means (to me and, I
>spose, him) that English isn't dechticaetiative, but rather has the
>capacity to express sentences dechticaetiatively.