The focus of the present research is ditransitive verbs in North Atlantic Varieties of English (NAVE) and South Asian Varieties of English (SAVE). We aim to locate the core features of ditransitive verbs which may be common among all the varieties of English. Wherever there are differences found these will be noted and discussed but the main aim of this research is to locate common elements or features of ditransitive verbs. This research intends to fill the gap in Mukherjee (2005) and Mukherjee and Hoffman (2006) work. The present research includes the analysis of the indirect object as pronoun/ noun phrase/zero, noun phrase as simple/complex, animacy, and semantic role. Furthermore, the direct object is studied for all the parameters for the indirect object and in addition clausal direct object and semantic features are also studied. The indirect and direct objects have not been studied in such detail either by Mukherjee (2005) or Mukherjee and Hoffman (2006). We narrow the gap between the research conducted by Levin (1993), where she uses the ‘Dative Alternation’ Verbs of NAVE. We aim to locate if ditransitive verbs in SAVE exhibit similar alternation. The current study seeksto understand the difference in the frequency and complementation patterns of the
following ditransitive verbs GIVE, TELL, SEND and OFFER following the work carried out by Mukherjee (2005) and Mukherjee and Hoffman (2006). For this research, the verbs have been extracted from the Globe Web-Based English (GloWbE) Corpus and the News on the Web (NOW) Corpus. Following Bencini and Goldberg (2000), Gries and Wulff (2005), and Manzanares and López (2008), a sorting experiment was prepared to determine whether respondents sorted given sentences according to the verb or according to the construction. Our results showed that the respondents chose sentences according to verbs and not according to constructions. Therefore, we analyzed our corpora following Biber et al. (1999). We adopted Biber et al. (1999) as their findings are based on a corpus of 40 million words and they have adopted the grammatical categories described by Quirk et al. (1985) These verbs have been studied for their frequencies and grammatical patterns using the Chi-square test through SPSS. The overall frequency of a ditransitive verb in the corpus, the sentence patterns, and the semantic roles of the constituents of a sentence and the ditransitive schema determine if it is typical/central, habitual, or peripheral (Mukherjee, 2005). The current data shows that if a verb is central or habitual in US English, it is central or habitual in the other five varieties, i.e., GB, IN, LK, PK, and BD English also. We find that GIVE and TELL are typical/central verbs and OFFER and SEND are habitual verbs. The only major difference that has been found in the current data is in the frequencies of the use of any of the four verbs or any of the features of the indirect and direct object in NAVE and SAVE. In other words, we attempt to locate if there are any significant differences in the use of a sentence pattern among the six varieties of English or if there are significant differences in the use of PrNs, NPs, simple/complex NPs, participant role of the indirect and direct objects with each of the four verbs among the six varieties of English and/or between NAVE and SAVE An important observation is that each of the verbs studied has its prototypical pattern type as follows:

Pattern Type
GIVE: (S) GIVE [Oi: NP] [Od:NP]
TELL: (S) TELL [Oi:NP] [Od:that/Øthat clause]
OFFER: (S) OFFER [Od:NP] [OiØ]
SEND: (S) SEND [Od:NP] [Oi: to + NP]

The results of the analysis of the four ditransitive verbs indicate that the indirect object is generally a pronoun, a simple noun if it is a noun phrase, animate and recipient. The direct object is generally a complex noun phrase, except a noun clause in TELL, inanimate, and affected. With this research, we hope to contribute to the understanding of how a particular sentence pattern is prototypical for each of the four verbs and if the prototypical sentence pattern affects the different features of the indirect and direct objects as explained above, and if there are differences between NAVE and SAVE in the frequencies of the prototypical patterns.