This study addresses the issue of diachronic development of passives in English double object constructions (DOCs) from the perspective of comparative syntax. Ditransitive passives have undergone changes since Old English (OE), i.e., from the passivization of the direct object (DO) in OE to that of the indirect object (IO) in Late Middle English and Modern English (ModE), including Present-day English. The present study is an attempt to account for this change within the Chomskyan Minimalist framework. The main conclusion of this article is that IO has always been a prepositional phrase, either with null preposition (P) in OE or with null or overt P (to) in Middle English (ME) and ModE. I begin by identifying the "base" structure of DOCs as the DO-[pp P-IO] frame. I then argue on the basis of facts about other Germanic languages that IO has often been introduced by null P in English. This preposition blocks passivization of a closer IO and instead allows for passivization of a more distant DO, as predicted by the Merge/Agree theory of the Minimalist Program. I argue that null P in ditransitives is licensed by case morphology in OE and by preposition incorporation in ME and ModE. The last section deals with the vexing problem of a time lag between the emergence of direct passives and that of recipient passives in English and then addresses the issue of ditransitive passives in Icelandic and Faroese, showing that they do not constitute counterexamples to my analysis.
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