Object

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JerryS - 18 Jan 2009 23:03 GMT

What kind of object would you say "John" is in the following two
sentences? Direct/indirect?

1) Helen blamed John for the divorce.
2) Mary warned John of the dangers.

How about "me" in the next two?

3) John convinced me that he was right.
4) John asked me what time the meeting would end.

Thanks.

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jerry_friedman@yahoo.com - 19 Jan 2009 00:46 GMT

> What kind of object would you say "John" is in the following two
> sentences? Direct/indirect?
[quoted text clipped - 6 lines]
> 3) John convinced me that he was right.
> 4) John asked me what time the meeting would end.

The first three are direct. I believe an indirect object usually can
be paraphrased with a preposition and the same verb: "He threw me the
ball." = "He threw the ball to me." And you can grammatically omit
it: "He threw the ball."

In your example 4, either object can be omitted, and either can get a
preposition. I'm not sure the direct/indirect terminology is
appropriate here, though someone may have a better answer.

English verbs can take a wide variety of complements. If you want
specific terms for the prepositional-phrase and subordinate-clause
complements in your examples, I think you'll need to look to
linguistics, which I don't know much about. And you might find a
number of choices, rather than the fairly standard terms "direct" and
"indirect".

--
Jerry Freidman

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JerryS - 19 Jan 2009 12:10 GMT

>>What kind of object would you say "John" is in the following two
>>sentences? Direct/indirect?
[quoted text clipped - 15 lines]
> preposition. I'm not sure the direct/indirect terminology is
> appropriate here, though someone may have a better answer.

Thanks.

Unfortunately, I agree with you. Unfortunately, as this doesn't solve my
puzzle:

---------
Alonside the ordinary indirect object pattern, two main prepositional
patterns may be distinguished:

Indirect object + direct object [D1]
Direct object + prepositional object [D2a]
Indirect object + prepositional object [D2b]

[and they list:]

1) Helen blamed John for the divorce. [D2b]
2) Mary warned John of the dangers. [D2b]

Quirk, A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, p. 1208-1209
---------

Listing both 1) and 2) as [D2b] makes "John" indirect object in both cases.

Now, on 3):

-----
Variants of ditransitive complementation
[D3] Indirect object + "that"-clause object

Corresponding to monotransitive verbs of Type [B3] (cf 16.30) are
ditransitive verbs for which the direct object is a "that" clause:

3) John convinced me that he was right.

Quirk et al, p. 1212
-----

That this is listed immediately under
"[D3] Indirect object + "that"-clause object" makes me believe they
think "me" is indirect object.

Still puzzled.

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jerry_friedman@yahoo.com - 19 Jan 2009 16:53 GMT

> jerry_fried...@yahoo.com wrote:
> >>What kind of object would you say "John" is in the following two
[quoted text clipped - 16 lines]
> > preposition. I'm not sure the direct/indirect terminology is
> > appropriate here, though someone may have a better answer.

Well, I don't know whether "me" can get a preposition. ?John asked of
me what time the meeting would end. But there may be an "of" lurking
there somewhere.

> Thanks.
>
[quoted text clipped - 38 lines]
>
> Still puzzled.

I was just answering as a "seat-of-the-pants syntactician"
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004167.html
without a comprehensive grammatical scheme (which would make me a
synstrategist).

As Quirk et al. were expounding such a scheme, I think they should
have defined their terms, and you should be able to tell from the
definitions why they identified those objects as indirect. If they
didn't, maybe they implied a definition somewhere. For instance, a
statement "All indirect objects have this property" may really mean
"We call an object 'indirect' if it has this property." (And if there
are no general statements about indirect objects, what's the point of
distinguishing them?) The criterion for example 3 may be that if
there are two noun-phrase complements, indirect objects come first,
with another criterion that a "that"-clause object is not considered
either direct or indirect.

--
Jerry Friedman

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JerryS - 19 Jan 2009 20:23 GMT

> As Quirk et al. were expounding such a scheme, I think they should
> have defined their terms, and you should be able to tell from the
> definitions why they identified those objects as indirect. If they
> didn't, maybe they implied a definition somewhere.

Oh, no, such a reputable treatise does things properly:

------
The indirect object typically refers to an animate being that is the
recipient of the action.

Quirk, p. 727
---
The most typical role of an indirect subject is that of a RECIPIENT
participant: i.e. of the animate being that is passively implicated by
the happening or state:

I've found _you_ a place.
We paid _them_ the money.

Another term for the RECIPIENT is DATIVE.

p. 741
------

Now, I don't have a problem with the majority of indirect object (such
as the two in this posting) identified by them, however I have with
those indicated by them for the OP, which are "John" (for 1, 2) and "me"
(for 3, 4). Thus, I've a problem with the way they look at _some_ verbs.

E.g. they don't seem to accept the idea that say in 3:

3) John convinced me that he was right.

one can have two DIRECT objects:
- one, "me"
- the other, "that he was right"
but prefer to say that the first is indirect, and the 2nd direct.

This bothers me esp as "to convince" is rightly reported as transitive
by all dictionaries. To me the action goes to both "me" (effort to
convince me) and to "that he was right."

Cheers for now.

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Peter Groves - 19 Jan 2009 21:52 GMT

>> As Quirk et al. were expounding such a scheme, I think they should
>> have defined their terms, and you should be able to tell from the
[quoted text clipped - 40 lines]
>
> Cheers for now.

I think perhaps they're trying to shoehorn the construction into one of the
more familiar patterns, such as "he told me that he was right", where "me"
clearly is the indirect object. Clearly "convince", like "tell", requires
two arguments, a person and a proposition; as you rightly say the person is
a direct object, but I'm not sure that the proposition is one: it seems
almost like a sort of adverbial complement, like the prepositional phrase in
"he convinced me of his rightness". As you say, it's a bit of a puzzle.

Peter Groves

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Mike Lyle - 19 Jan 2009 22:17 GMT

>>> As Quirk et al. were expounding such a scheme, I think they should
>>> have defined their terms, and you should be able to tell from the
[quoted text clipped - 48 lines]
> of adverbial complement, like the prepositional phrase in "he
> convinced me of his rightness". As you say, it's a bit of a puzzle.

I too feel "convince" is transitive. I'm not knocking Quirk and the team
when I say I happily got rid of their Grammar some years ago; but I
think linguistics becomes an art form sooner than most or all academic
subjects. (I stopped myself writing "a mere art form", because I approve
of art forms; but it's important to remember, even if one disagrees with
it, the notion that to be considered "art" a thing must be useless.)

Signature

Mike.

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Glenn Knickerbocker - 19 Jan 2009 22:38 GMT

> I think perhaps they're trying to shoehorn the construction into one of the
> more familiar patterns, such as "he told me that he was right"

I don't see the need for a shoehorn. It seems like exactly the same
construction to me.

¬R

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Donna Richoux - 19 Jan 2009 23:10 GMT

> > I think perhaps they're trying to shoehorn the construction into one of the
> > more familiar patterns, such as "he told me that he was right"
>
> I don't see the need for a shoehorn. It seems like exactly the same
> construction to me.

Glenn, can I ask you you leave a little more reference material on your
posts? I can't tell what "the construction" is, and so what is the same
as what, unless I go back and open up the previous post.

I think a good clue (and now I'm speaking to others who also do this) is
if you use a pronoun, in this case "it", that doesn't refer to anything
visible, you've cut too much. What's more, pronouns lacking referents
probably lead to more bickering here than anything else, as people jump
to wrong conclusions.

Thanks.

Anyway, if you're saying that "I told him something" is like *"I
convinced him something," then I disagree.

Signature

Best -- Donna Richoux

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Glenn Knickerbocker - 19 Jan 2009 23:49 GMT

> Glenn, can I ask you you leave a little more reference material on your
> posts?

Yep, you can ask. I can try. In this case, I didn't find anything to
quote that I felt made the context much clearer.

> if you use a pronoun, in this case "it", that doesn't refer to anything
> visible,

"The construction" was its clear antecedent. What *that* referred to
was buried far away in quoted material that I figured anybody who still
cared had already read several times.

> Anyway, if you're saying that "I told him something" is like *"I
> convinced him something," then I disagree.

Not "something" in general. "I told him <factual noun clause>" and "I
convinced him <factual noun clause>" seem the same to me. I don't see
what's iffy about that.

¬R

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Chuck Riggs - 20 Jan 2009 15:52 GMT

>> > I think perhaps they're trying to shoehorn the construction into one of the
>> > more familiar patterns, such as "he told me that he was right"
[quoted text clipped - 11 lines]
>probably lead to more bickering here than anything else, as people jump
>to wrong conclusions.

That has certainly been my experience. While including as little
referential material as possible, to keep the lengths of my posts
within reason, my test for clarity is that each of my posts must be
able to stand alone.

<snip>

Signature

Regards,

Chuck Riggs
Near Dublin, Ireland

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jerry_friedman@yahoo.com - 20 Jan 2009 04:28 GMT

Well, there are both semantic and syntactic differences between "tell"
and "convince". When you convince somebody that something is true,
you change their mind, but when you tell somebody that something is
true, you give them information (note indirect object) that they can
ignore. So it seems reasonable to conclude that, in Quirk's
terminology, the person convinced is a patient but the person told
something is a recipient.

Also compare "convince somebody of something" and "tell somebody
something".

"I'm convinced." but ?"I'm told." (I'd say constructions such as
"Well, I guess I'm told!" and "She wanted me to tell you that, so
consider yourself told" are jocular.

So again, it seems reasonable to conclude that the person convinced is
the direct object and the person told is the indirect object, despite
the similarity of "convinced me that" and "told me that".

But I think there's some arbitrariness here. What goes wrong in one's
massive grammar if "me" in "convinced me that" is called an indirect
object? Or if "indirect object" is reserved for situations with two
noun phrases, and an object accompanied by a "that" clause or a
prepositional phrase is called something else? I may be agreeing with
Mike here. (I'll try to bear up.)

--
Jerry Friedman

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JerryS - 21 Jan 2009 09:49 GMT

[snip]

I got the following interesting reply from Phil White in another forum:
-------
It crosses my mind that some of the difficulty here stems from our
implicit understanding of the term "indirect object" as the recipient of
an action (as in the "give somebody a something" model). We generally
feel that we should be able to replace an indirect object with "to" +
preposition ("I gave a ball to Mary"). We don't have that much
difficulty extending this to subsume benefactive objects that can be
reformulated as prepositional phrases with prepositions other than "to":
"I bought Mary a ball" -> "I bought a ball for Mary".

The difficulties start where a verb that is clearly ditransitive ("I
asked her a question") begins to indicate less passiveness on the part
of the "recipient" and where the first object can only be reformulated
using a preposition that to an extent reverses the direction of the
activity ("I asked a question of her").

Still more difficult is a formulation with "ask" that does not permit
reformulation with a prepositional phrase ("I asked her to drive me to
the station"). But the function of "her" has still not changed in that
example.

At the end of the spectrum are words like "convince" or "persuade", that
demand active participation (in this case, agreement) from the recipient
and permit no prepositional recasting.

So take the following continuum:
"I told her my problem."
"I told her to drive me to the station."
"I asked her to drive me to the station."
"I persuaded/convinced her to drive me to the station."

At exactly what point on that continuum would you want to change the
function of "her" from an indirect object to a direct object and why
would any choice not be arbitrary?
The fact is that we have little difficulty subsuming benefactive objects
under indirect objects, so why not another class that is clearly (in my
opinion) not direct. Here we have another class that I have never seen
named as such in which the person suffering the action is also active in
response and as part of the action. Nevertheless, The same person in all
the examples above is suffering the action of being told, asked,
convinced or persuaded. (Perhaps the entire class should be termed
"sufferatives".)

In all cases, the same syntactical conversion can be used to change the
sentences to passives (the sufferer becomes the subject):
"She was told his problem."
"She was told to drive him to the station."
"She was asked to drive him to the station."
"She was persuaded to drive him to the station."

It seems to me that it is far easier to allow the definition of an
indirect object to include such cases than to try to shoehorn them into
the definition of a direct object.

But all that said, it could be possible to analyze a very small class of
verbs (including "convince" and "persuade" in all circumstances and
"tell" and "ask" in circumstances where part of the verb complementation
is a clause) in a way which introduces an object that is neither direct
nor indirect, and in which the second part of the verb complement is
permitted to be a clause, but does not have to be described as the
"object" at all.
---------

Cheers.

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Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2009

Object