Examples of ditransitive sentences under the four conditions.

Dat, dative case marker; Acc, accusative case marker. A word-by-word translation in English is shown after each example. In Japanese, the sentences with dative before accusative (DA) order and those with accusative before dative (AD) order are all grammatical and commonly used. We hypothesize that “the P+ sentences with the DA order” and “the P– sentences with the AD order” are canonical in word order; the canonicity depends on the semantic contrasts between P+ and P– sentences (see the Introduction).