Recipient-prominence vs. beneficiary-prominence

Surveying the encoding of the semantic roles of recipient, beneficiary, and recipient-beneficiary from a crosslinguistic perspective, the paper has two goals. First, by focusing on the encoding of the dual role of recipient-beneficiary, it tries to show that languages vary in the marking of this role: they either encode it the same way as they encode recipients or beneficiaries; in the case of recipient and beneficiary this variation is excluded. Second, current definitions of the label benefactive will be scrutinized, since this notion is split in a number of languages and the terminology proposed here is empirically more appropriate in some cases.