Competition between two methods of marking recipient/beneficiary and theme has figured in much recent research:(1)Jim gave the driver £5.   (indirect object before direct object)(2)Jim gave £5 to the driver.   (direct object before prepositional phrase)A reverse double object variant is often ignored or treated as a minor and highly restricted variant:(3)(a)?Jim gave £5 the driver.   (direct object before indirect object)(b)Jim gave it him.However, pattern (3) was much more widespread even in late Modern English, while there is clear dialectal variation within present-day British English.In this article we investigate the pronominal pattern (3b), mainly in relation to pattern (1), tracking its progressive restriction in distribution. We mine three of the Penn parsed corpora for the general history in English of double object patterns with two pronoun objects. We then add a further nine dialect and/or historical English corpora selected for coverage and representativeness. A usage database of examples in these corpora allows more detailed description than has been possible hitherto. The analysis focuses on verb lemmas, objects and dialect variation and offers an important corrective to the bulk of research on the so-called Dative Alternation between patterns (1) and (2). We also examine works in the normative grammatical tradition, producing a precept database that reveals the changing status of variants as dialectal or preferred. In our conclusion we show the importance of prefabricated expressions (prefabs) in the later history of (3), sketching an analysis in Construction Grammar terms.

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This article describes the aims, methodology and contents of the Eighteenth-Century English Grammars database online (ECEG). Starting with the definition of the term 'English grammar' in ECEG, which frames and sets the limits of what has been included in and excluded from the database, we then offer a detailed discussion of its design, compilation and annotation procedures. While describing the data coded in twenty-one individual relational fields, the article also hints at the potential avenues that the classification in ECEG opens up for academic research and educational purposes.

Since Charles Jones referred to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the ‘Cinderellas of English historical linguistic study’ (1989: 279), there has been a great deal of progress in research on this period, but, as Beal (2012: 22) points out, much of this has been in the fields of syntax, morphology, lexis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and the normative tradition. Beal argues that the availability of corpora of Late Modern English texts has greatly facilitated research in these areas, but, since creating phonological corpora for periods antedating the invention of sound recording is a challenging proposition, the historical phonology of Late Modern English has benefited much less from the corpus revolution. To redress this imbalance, the editors of this issue, with technical support from the Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield, created the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP), which is freely available at www.dhi.ac.uk/projects/ecep/