Introduce

This paper investigates the lexical and morpho-syntactic strategies used in three branches of European languages (Slavic, Romance, and Germanic) to express a specific non-prototypical type of three-participant event: that of an agent introducing a human Theme to a human Recipient. Earlier cross-linguistic research has shown that there are formal restrictions on the expression of three-participant events with two human non-agents. While these studies differ in the functional explanations offered for the attested restrictions, they are alike in taking the prototypical give ditransitive as their point of departure, and in predicting no principled differences in the behaviour of lexical verbs and/or event types other than give. This paper investigates to what extent the patterns found in these studies are applicable to introduce verbs, which occur in combination with two human non-agents (much) more frequently than give verbs. We find, on the one hand, that similar restrictions indeed apply in specific cases. On the other hand, the range of attested morpho-syntactic variation is wider than previous studies have accounted for. This variation is due to the strong influence on argument structure of individual lexical verbs and verb classes, as well as the specific semantic properties of the event type under study. Keywords: three-participant constructions; prototypicality; animacy; person; argument realization