Home > Object (grammar)

For example, the following monotransitive verbs have direct objects (marked in bold):

She ate the apple.

The philosophers discussed their theories.

In many languages, the patient of a ditransitive verb is marked in the same way as the single object of a monotransitive verb, and is called the direct object. The recipient has its own marking, and is called the indirect object. The direct object is marked by the accusative case, while the indirect object is typically marked by the dative case. (This is the system used in Latin.)

In more isolating languages such as English, objects are marked by their position in the sentence or using adpositionIn grammar, an adposition is a word or affix which shows a word's grammatical function. The two types of adposition are prepositions and postpositions. Prefixes and suffixes can also take on these roles: the Basque allative (motion towards) postposition is (like "to" in "I gave a book to him"). Modern English preserves a case distinction for pronouns, but it has conflated the accusative and the dative into a single objective form ("him", "her", "me", etc. may function either as direct or indirect objects).

In some languages, the recipient of a ditransitive verb is marked in the same way as the single object of a monotransitive verb, and is called the primary object . The patient of ditransitive verbs has its own marking, and is called the secondary object . Such languages are called dechticaetiative languageIn grammar, a language in which transitive verbs show a distinction between primary and secondary objects, rather than between direct and indirect objects. Ditransitive verbs have two objects: a patient that undegoes the action and a recipient or beneficis, and are mostly found among African languages. Some claim that English is also dechticaetiative, for example in the following sentences:

His colleagues gave him a present.

I sent my mother a card.

An object can be turned into a subjectThe subject of a verb is the argument which generally refers to the origin of the action or the undergoer of the state shown by the verb. However, this definition depends on the particular language under consideration. In languages where a passive voice e using passive voice, if the language in question has such a construction. In dative languages, the direct object is promoted, while in dechticaetiative languages the primary object is promoted.

In the immense majority of languages, where there's a preferred word order in the sentence, the object is placed after the subject. Analytic languageAn analytic language (or isolating language is a language in which the vast majority of morphemes are free morphemes and considered to be full-fledged "words". By contrast, in a synthetic language, a word is composed of agglutinated or fused morphemes thas additionally tend to place the object after the verb, so that it remains distinct from the subject.