Dative movement

The term dative movement has been used to refer to the transformation that relates a prepositional indirect-object construction (The girl gave milk to the cat) to a double-object construction (The girl gave the cat milk), especially in English (e.g. Erteschik-Shir 1979).

Comments
Since the transformational analysis is no longer popular, the neutral term dative alternation is now mostly used for the English alternation in question.

Synonyms

 * dative shift
 * dative transformation
 * dativization