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The purpose of this paper is to present a proper analysis on the syntactic structure of the English dative constructions. English dative constructions contain two objects, as in (ia,b). (i) a. John gave a book to Mary. b. John gave Mary a book. The construction in (ib) contains a direct object -a book- and an indirect object -Mary-. In syntactic theory, this construction raises two major problems. The first problem involves Case theory and the assumption that adjacency is required between an object and the verb that case-marks it. The second problem concerns the exact syntactic position of both objects. Until now, within the binary-branching framework, two major approaches to English dative constructions have emerged. The first approach treats dative constructions as a special case of small clause constructions. Proposals of this type include Chomsky1981, Stowell1981, Kayne1984, Aoun & Li1989, and Johnson1991. Secondly, a number of researchers have proposed analysis in which the verb combines with an NP or PP to form a "complex predicate", which takes another VP-internal object as its "inner subject. " Recent proposals of this kind include Larson1988 and Bowers1993. However, the small clause theory has had great difficulty in finding a plausible justification for the case of a direct object and the exact syntactic position of both objects. Also, the complex predicate theory cannot account for the surface position of the direct object between the parts of the complex predicate. Thus, we have argued that English dative constructions can be explained by the semantic and pragmatic analysis than by the syntactic analysis. That is, we claim that the two objects of the double object construction can be distinguished as the target (indirect object) and the patient (direct object), considering the meaning and function of verbs.