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This paper examines the salient aspects of the English ditransitive construction and the constraints on the subject and recipient of the construction in order to understand its metaphorical extensions, and reviews the notion of controllability and its applicability to the construction. To sum up, the results of this study are as follows: (i) Dativizable verbs denote prospective possession of the referent of the second object by the referent of the first object and the central sense of the ditransitive construction is associated with a highly specific semantic structure, that of successful transfer between a volitional agent and a willing recipient. (ii) The notion of possession need not have only a literal meaning and thus such verbs of communication are treated as denoting the transfer of message or stimuli, which the recipient metaphorically possesses, which means the possibility of metaphorical extensions. (iii) Several systematic metaphors which allow extensions have been identified, but when it comes to the inanimate subject of the dirtransitive construction, the notion ‘volitionality’ cannot lead to a proper interpretation of the metaphoric extensions owing to some limitation in itself, so the application of the feature CONTROL representing controllability, is needed in order to involve and interpret even its extended constructions adequately. (iv) The rule of Dative Shift is not just an unmotivated, arbitrary syntactic option, but it has a definite semantic motivation.