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Traditional grammar defines the object in a sentence as the entity that is acted upon by the subject. There is thus a primary distinction between subjects and objects that is understood in terms of the action expressed by the verb, e.g. Tom studies grammar - Tom is the subject and grammar is the object. Traditional theories of sentence structure divide the simple sentence into a subject and a predicate, whereby the object is taken to be part of the predicate. Many modern theories of grammar (e.g. dependency grammars), in contrast, take the object to be a verb argument like the subject, the difference between them being mainly just their prominence; the subject is ranked higher than the object and is thus more prominent.
Contents
- Types of objects
- Syntactic category
- Identifying objects
- Verb classes
- Objects in sentence structure
- References
The main verb in a clause determines whether and what objects are present. Transitive verbs require the presence of an object, whereas intransitive verbs block the appearance of an object. The term complement overlaps in meaning with object: all objects are complements, but not vice versa. The objects that verbs do and do not take is explored in detail in valency theory.
Types of objects
Various object types are commonly acknowledged: direct, indirect, and prepositional. These object types are illustrated in the following table:
The descriptions "entity acted upon" and "entity indirectly affected by the action" are merely loose orientation points. Beyond basic examples such as those provided in the table, these orientation points are not much help when the goal is to determine whether a given object should be viewed as direct or indirect. One rule of thumb for English, however, is that an indirect object is not present unless a direct object is also present. A prepositional object is one that is introduced by a preposition. Despite the difficulties with the traditional nomenclature, the terms direct object and indirect object are widespread.
The term oblique object is also employed at times, although what exactly is meant varies from author to author. Some understand it to be an umbrella term denoting all objects (direct, indirect, and prepositional), whereas others use the term to denote just a prepositional object.
Some Chinese verbs can have two direct objects, one being more closely bound to the verb than the other; these may be called "inner" and "outer" objects.
Syntactic category
While the typical object is a pronoun, noun, or noun phrase, objects can also appear as other syntactic categories, as illustrated in the following table:
Identifying objects
A number of criteria can be employed for identifying objects, e.g.
Languages vary significantly with respect to these criteria. The first criterion identifies objects reliably most of the time in English, e.g.
The second criterion is also a reliable criterion for isolating languages such as English, since the relatively strict word order of English usually positions the object after the verb(s) in declarative sentences. The third criterion is less applicable to English, though, since English lacks morphological case, exceptions being the personal pronouns (I/me, he/him, she/her, they/them). For languages that have case and thus freer word order, morphological case is the most readily available criterion for identifying objects. In Latin and related languages, direct objects are usually marked with the accusative case, and indirect objects with the dative case. Note as well that some objects are marked in telling ways in particular languages. In Spanish, for example, human objects have to be marked by the preposition a; the phenomenon is called differential object marking.
Verb classes
Verbs can be classified according to the number and/or type of objects that they do or do not take. The following table provides an overview of some of the various verb classes:
Ergative and object-deletion verbs can be transitive or intransitive, as indicated in the following table:
The distinction drawn here between ergative and object-deletion verbs is based on the role of the subject. The object of a transitive ergative verb is the subject of the corresponding intransitive ergative verb. With object-deletion verbs, in contrast, the subject is consistent regardless of whether an object is or is not present.
Objects in sentence structure
Objects are distinguished from subjects in the syntactic trees that represent sentence structure. The subject appears (as high or) higher in the syntactic structure than the object. The following trees of a dependency grammar illustrate the hierarchical positions of subjects and objects:
The subject is in blue, and the object in orange. The subject is consistently a dependent of the finite verb, whereas the object is a dependent of the lowest non-finite verb if such a verb is present.