Four kinds of object symmetry Bill Haddican a and Anders Holmberg b a CUNY Queens College/Graduate Center, New York, USA; b Newcastle University/Cambridge University, Newcastle/CambridgeUniversity of Cambridge, UK a whaddican@qc.cuny.edu; b anders.holmberg@newcastle.ac.uk Abstract: This paper examines cross-speaker and cross-dialectal variation in object symmetry effects in three Germanic languages, English, Norwegian and Swedish. We argue that object symmetry effects are not a unified phenomenon, but rather that the availability of locality obviating theme movement out of applicative structures has different sources in different constructions. Both case-based and locality-based explanations are needed to model the attested variation. An additional goal of the paper is to describe a new shape conservation effect in object shift contexts. Theme-goal orders in Norwegian object shift obtains if and only if the theme and goal invert vP- internally. This effect is predicted by Fox and Pesetsky’s (2005) Cyclic Linearization model. Keywords: passive; applicative; locality; A-movement; linearization 1. Introduction This paper focuses on the passive symmetry problem, that is, the problem of explaining cross-linguistic variation in the availability of passive movement out of double object constructions (DOCs). A phenomenon much studied in the comparative syntactic literature of the last three decades is that languages with DOCs fall into one of two main classes with respect to passive movement. One class of language, typically called “asymmetric passive” languages, allows for passivization of goal arguments out of DOCs, but not theme arguments. We illustrate this in (1) from one such language, Danish: (1).. (a) Jeg blev givet fem ting. I was given five things “I was given five things.” [Goal passives] (b) *Fem ting blev givet mig. five things were given me “Five things were given me.” [Theme passives]