We analyzed the three main types of English dative constructions – the double-objectdative, the to dative, and the for dative – in the spontaneous speechof seven children from the age of 1;6 to 5;0. The main findings were as follows. First, thedouble-object dative was acquired by most of the children before either of the prepositionaldatives; this was attributed to the greater frequency with which children heard this constructionwith individual verbs. Second, the verbs children used with these constructions were not only theadult prototypical ones, but also a number of the less prototypical ones; again, this was very likelydue to their frequency and saliency in the language children heard. Third, no support was foundfor Ninio's (1999) analysis of the emergence of constructions in terms of a single“pathbreaking” verb; rather, children began using the double-object dative withmany different verbs and did not follow the trajectory proposed by Ninio (i.e., a single verb isused for some months before an “explosion” of new verbs is introduced in theconstruction). Finally, most of the verbs initially used in the three dative constructions were firstused in other constructions (e.g., a simple transitive); this was even true for some obligatorydatives, such as give and show. The current results provide a starting pointfor determining the underlying representations for the different kinds of dative constructions andfor explicating how children understand the interrelations among these and other constructions.