Datives

I just came back from The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Overall, I didn't like it. The film was beautiful, and the kid playing Eustace did a great job, but they added a wholly unnecessary "quest" and "mythic evil force" to the book, plus tacked on an ending that didn't belong there. Not to mention the overwhelming deus ex machina that Aslan seems to have become - a bit of propaganda beyond even what Lewis was guilty of. But there was an interesting linguistic bit inside that ending - written for the movie. Aslan has met the Pevensies, Eustace, Reepicheep, and Caspian (yes, Caspian) on the sandy spit beyond which his country lies. Caspian asks if his father is there; Aslan tells him that only he can learn that answer, but that if he goes he must realize there can be no return. Caspian ends up not going; when Edmund asks why, he says "I cannot believe my father would be pleased with my abandoning what he died for. All my life I have thought about was taken from me, not what was given. I was given a kingdom, and I must rule it. I will try to be a better king."

There are three passives (well, four if you count "my father would be pleased"):

what was taken from me
what was given
I was given a kingdom

They neatly illustrate the difference between the accusative (normal) passive construction, and the dative (recipient) passive, which fewer languages have and which is relatively recent in English.

Note that the first two are structurally similar. The subject of the sentence is the direct object of the active voice sentence, and the actor - the person who took and gave - isn't mentioned. In the first, the recipient, or rather the loser - probably the same as a "dative of separation" in some languages, though the case following "from" is often genitive. Nonetheless, the "from me" and the elided "to me" (what was given to me) fill the same prep + noun slot in the both the active and passive sentences, with fronted 'what':

they took something from me (they took what from me)
they gave something to me (they gave what to me)

It's even possible to drop the from in the passive: "All my life I have thought about what was taken, not what was given" though this sounds a bit odd. It's grammatical though. In short, in a normal passive you can not only omit the actor (the "they") but also the recipient/loser (the "to me"/"from me") phrases. All you need is the original direct object (the "what"), now made the grammatical subject.

But in the final sentence, we've converted not the original direct object but the original recipient into the grammatical subject.

They gave a kingdom to me
I was given a kingdom

We're still not naming the actor - who is this "they" who took Caspian's father and gave him a kingdom? Is it even the same person? It's not important, that's why the passive; it focuses all the attention on the giving and the taking and on Caspian, where it belongs. But once we've promoted Caspian to the subject, we can no longer create a sentence with only subject and verb. That is, you can say a kingdom was given with or without the "to me". But you can't say I was given without "the kingdom".

Or rather, you can say it - but it now means that Caspian himself is what was given. The only way we can interpret the subject of a passive sentence as the dative of the original (the recipient or the loser or the benefactor (to, from, for...) is if we include the direct object as the direct object. Otherwise, we default to interpreting the subject as the original direct object, and it's very very hard to overcome that even if context makes it unlikely, or impossible, to be true.

Most grammar books simply tell you about promoting the object to the subject slot, but all speakers of English know how to use Caspian's "I was given a kingdom" passive as well. And most of us know when the semantics (the meaning) of what we're saying call for its particular syntactic stress. In this case, what Caspian was given - the kingdom - is the most important thing, and it needs to come last. But who gave it to him can't really even be quantified.