#indirect object

In the sentence-

“I like big boys”

I am the subject because I’m doing the action.

The boys are the object because they are having the action done to them.

Sometimes the object can come first in the sentence. We call this passive voice.

For instance, “the big boys are liked by me” is in passive voice. Most of the time passive voice sounds unnatural so your english teacher will tell you not to use it. However if you want to emphasize the object of a sentence it can actually be a good idea to use passive voice.

Sentences always have to have a subject but sometimes the subject is implied.

This can happen when the sentence is in the imparitive or when it’s in the passive voice.

Imperitive- prepare to die.

In this sentence whoever I’m telling to prepare to die is the subject.

Passive- the cookies were eaten.

In this sentence whoever ate the cookies is the subject.

Not all sentences have an object.

The sentence “naruto ran” has a subject but no object.

Sentences can also have more than one object!

In the sentence “my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard” both the boys and the yard are objects.

The boys are the direct object because the subject is doing the verb to them.

The yard is the indirect object because it’s just providing extra information.

Verbs that do not use a direct object are intransitive. In the sentence “naruto ran” ran is intransitive.

Verbs that do take a direct object are either linking verbs (sometimes called copulas) or transitive verbs.

A transitive verb occurs when the subject is doing an action to the object.

In the sentence “I like big boys” the verb is transitive because I am doing it to the boys.

The verb to be is weird. It can take a direct object like a transitive verb, but in such a sentence no action is happening.

take the sentence “you’re a wizard harry”

Harry is the subject. A wizard is the direct object. But harry isn’t really doing anything to a wizard.

As you can see to be is neither transitive nor intransitive, so it gets its own category. Well it has to share with “to seem” but those are pretty much the only linking verbs I can think of.

Test your Knowledge

-identify the subject, verb type and any objects in the following sentences-

You have a fast car.

They replaced sir paul mccartney with a look a like in the ‘60’s.

green is not a creative color.

Flat earthers are not respected by the scientific community.

That song really slaps.

you will be given adequate supplies.

You know nothing jon snow.

All the other kids with the pumped up kicks are running.

The honey was eaten by the bear in the woods.

never talk to me or my son again.

@prismatic-bell, you asked these questions here. I don’t know if you still need them answered, but I figured that someone on Tumblr might, and I wanted to help, if I could. 

1) –what is the difference between its and it’s and how do I know when to use each one?

“It’s” Is a contraction. It stands for “it is” or, less commonly, “it has.” Examples: It’s [It is] going to be hot today.  It’s [It has] been a long and frustrating three months.

“Its” (without the apostrophe) shows possession or ownership by something not gendered. Examples: The dog dislikes its collar. The corporation was violating its own rules. 

If you are not sure when to use it, try expanding “its” to “it is” or it has”. Example: She had a job at Wal-Mart, but she loathed its policies toward workers. If you expand that to “she loathed it is policies”, it doesn’t make sense.  If you expand the contraction and the sentence makes no sense, you know that you should use “its,” not “it’s.”

For further information: Google “it's vs its.”

2) –what is the difference between ‘one’ and ‘each’?

“Each” is used to indicate every member of a group of two or more. “One” means, well, one. 

For further information: Google “each definition.”

3) –what is the difference between ‘which’ and ‘that’?

From Writer’s Digest:

If the sentence doesn’t need the clause that the word in question is connecting, use which. If it does, use that. (Pretty easy to remember, isn’t it?) Let me explain with a couple of examples.

Our office, which has two lunchrooms, is located in Cincinnati. Our office that has two lunchrooms is located in Cincinnati.

These sentences are not the same. The first sentence tells us that you have just one office, and it’s located in Cincinnati. The clause which has two lunchrooms gives us additional information, but it doesn’t change the meaning of the sentence. Remove the clause and the location of our one office would still be clear: Our office is located in Cincinnati.

The second sentence suggests that we have multiple offices, but the office with two lunchrooms is located in Cincinnati. The phrase that has two lunchrooms is known as a restrictive clause because another part of the sentence (our office) depends on it. You can’t remove that clause without changing the meaning of the sentence.

Let’s look at another example:

The time machine, which looked like a telephone booth, concerned Bill and Ted. The time machine that looked like a telephone booth concerned Bill and Ted.

In the first sentence (thanks to the use of which), the time machine concerned Bill and Ted. It also happened to look like a telephone booth. In the second sentence (which uses the restrictive clause), Bill and Ted are concerned with the time machine that looks like a telephone booth. They aren’t concerned with the one that looks like a garden shed or the one that looks like a DeLorean (Marty McFly may have reservations about that one).

4) –please, PLEASE explain how to use who, whose, and whom in a way that involves an actual sentence. (This one was me.)

“Who” is a subject pronoun like “I,” “he”, “she”, “we” or “they”. It asks “what person” did, is doing, or is going to do something or was, is, or will be in a certain state. Examples:  Who taught you science last year? Who is responsible for that terrible law? Who will be at the dance?

“Who” also has a contraction, “who’s.” That stands for “who is” or “who has.” The second sentence in the above example could be written as “Who’s responsible for that terrible law?” Or, to give another example, “Who’s your favorite actor?”

“Whose” is a possessive pronoun meaning “belonging to what person.”   Examples: Whose phone is lying on the floor? Whose party are you going to, Emma’s or Tanisha’s?

“Whom” is an object pronoun like “me,” "him,” “her,” "us,” and “them.”  It’s used to indicate that that someone is having an action done to them. It is primarily used in extremely formal English: To whom am I speaking?  (But most people would just say “Who am I speaking to?)

To quote Grammarly.com: When in doubt, try this simple trick: If you can replace the word with “he”' or “'she,” use who. If you can replace it with “him” or “her,” use whom. 

5) –what is an indirect object? (this boy actually acknowledged his own question and said in tenth grade his teacher said “you’ll already have learned this in sixth grade.” They had not.)

Okay. The shortest sentences are just a subject and a verb.  Stephen King gives some examples of nonsense sentences like “Mountains float” and “Plums deify” in his book On Writing.  Here, I’m going to use “Margaret built.” We don’t know what she built. We just know that she built something.

Next, we’ll add a direct object. Who or what did Margaret build?

Margaret built a robot.

“Robot” is the direct object. “Margaret” is the subject of the sentence; she is doing the building. “Robot” is the direct object; it is the thing being built. It receives the action of the verb.

Now that we have a direct object, we can add an indirect object. An indirect object is the person, place or thing that the direct object is directed toward.

Margaret built her beloved wife a robot.

Margaret also wrote her wife a love letter.

In both cases, “wife” is the indirect object; she’s the one that is receiving the direct object.

In most cases, sentences with indirect objects can be turned into sentences with the propositions “to” or “for.”  Margaret built a robot FOR her beloved wife. Margaret also wrote a love letter TO her wife

6) –what’s the difference between further and farther?

From Grammar Girl:

The quick and dirty tip is to use “farther” for physical distance and “further” for metaphorical, or figurative, distance. It's easy to remember because “farther” has the word “far” in it, and “far” obviously relates to physical distance.

These examples will help:

Imagine Squiggly and Aardvark are flying to a galaxy far, far away, but Squiggly gets bored and starts mercilessly bugging Aardvark. "How much farther?'" he keeps asking in despair.

Did you hear that? Squiggly used “farther” because he was asking about physical distance.

If Aardvark gets frustrated with Squiggly, which he surely will, he could respond, “If you complain further, I'm going to shoot you out the airlock.”

Aardvark used “further” because he isn't talking about physical distance. He's talking about a figurative distance: the extent of Squiggly's complaining.

The good news is that in ambiguous cases it doesn't matter which word you choose. Although careful writers will try to stick with the distinction between “further” and “farther,” the Oxford English Dictionary, Fowler's Modern English Usage, and a number of other sources say that, in most cases, it's fine to use “further” and “farther” interchangeably, especially when the distinction isn't clear. People have been using them interchangeably for hundreds of years, and a few experts don't even follow the distinction.

For further info, Google “farther vs further.”

7)  I’m 29 years old and I STILL don’t understand the difference between “to lie” and “to lay.” I know there is one! I know that grammatically it should be “it was laid down, and there it lies,” but I don’t know why.

First off, “lie” and “lay” are a headache for a lot of people. You aren’t alone. Second, I’m going back to Grammar Girl for this one.

First, we'll do the easy part, which is the present tense.

If you exclude the meaning "to tell an untruth" and just focus on the setting/reclining meaning of lay and lie, then the important distinction is that lay requires a direct object and lie does not. So you lie down on the sofa (no direct object), but you lay the book down on the table (the book is the direct object). This is in the present tense, where you are talking about doing something now: you lie down on the sofa, and you lay down a book.

But then everything goes all haywire, because lay is the past tense of lie. It's a total nightmare! I tried and tried to come up with a mnemonic for this, but I couldn't do it. Instead, I've made a table that you can print out from the website and tape up over your desk or in your notebook, because you just have to memorize this or look it up every time. 

As you know certain actions have effects on other things this is represented by functions such as the direct object and the indirect object. The direct object is marked by 을/를 in Korean and the indirect object is represented , this post's topic, is represented by three possible particles: 에게/한테/에.

Reminder: An indirect object is something or someone that is part of the action, but does not undergo (= Direct object) itself. It participates by being the target/recipient of the action.

Be aware that like in English, not all verbs have indirect objects. Here are a few Korean verbs that might end up using this particle: 주다, 선물하다, 던지다, 보내다, 부치다, 쓰다, 전화하다, 가르치다, 말하다, 팔다, 가다 and 오다.  For some verbs, 에게/한테/에 is only used when 을/를 is already present in the sentence, such as happens for 가르치다.

The Plants And The Rest

As already mentioned there are three different indirect object particles. Automatically the question that comes to mind is: "What is the difference?". First there is a difference between 에게/한테 and 에. You use 에 when the target of an action is a plant or a non living thing. 에게/한테 you use for all living things except plants. The difference between 에게/한테 is minimal. 한테 is simply more colloquial; it is more often used in spoken Korean.

Being the Recipient

However, you might want to tell people from whom you received that present. In that case you simply need to slightly adjust this particle. You do this by adding 서 at the end of the particle so 에게 becomes 에게서. This is used with 받다 and 배우다.

Let's see this in action:

Example: 나는 선생님한테서 한국어를 배웠어요. (I learn Korean from my teacher)

Lui and leur are perhaps the trickiest of the French personal pronouns. It is roughly translatable to him/her/them, but its usage may be a bit obscure, particularly understanding when exactly to use it, and whether or not if it needs a preposition. 

Let’s take lui first. Lui is the third-person masculine singular personal pronoun used as an indirect object. The indirect object is the person or object that is affected by the action of a verb. They are preceded by a preposition. Some examples are je donne des fleurs à ma mère, il parle de Pierre, and les enfants obéissent à ses parents. 

Unfortunately, pronominalizing the indirect object it is not as straightforward as replacing it by lui. Consider the three phrases je parle à mon ami, je pense à mon ami and je pense à mon avenir. These three phrases are structually identical, and since they all have a masculine indirect object, we might think that pronominalizing them would give the same pronoun. Nope: je lui parle, je pense à lui, and j'y pense. What. The. Heck.

The explanation lies not in the fact that the phrases employ an indirect object, but in the verb used. For this purpose, we have two types of verbs: verbs that need a recipient (verbes d’échange) and those that don’t. Verbes d’échange absolutely require a person as their indirect object to make sense. We can check this by replacing it with some nonsensical, inanimate object: parler/écrire qqch/donner qqch/expliquer qqch + à + une table/une montagne/un tiroir. These examples simply don't make sense (I mean, you can talk to a table all you like, but you won’t get any reply, implying there is no meaningful exchange happening, hence the name verbe d'échange), and thus the verbs require a conscious recipient. When dealing with these verbs, we use the pronom conjoint (joint pronoun) for indirect objects (here, third person), lui. Joint refers to the fact that lui is attached to the other pronouns before the verb: je parle à mon ami → je lui parle.

The second type of verbs doesn't care whether if the indirect object is a person or not; it makes just as much sense to be thinking about our friends as it does to think about a house. When the indirect object is a person, we pronominalize with pronom disjoint, placing the pronoun behind the verb, separated by a preposition: je pense à lui. If the indirect object is not a person, y is used as pronom conjoint. Technically it is possible to pronominalize a person as y, but it is considered very bad practice. 

Since lui is third-person masculine singular, we also have to consider the number and person of the indirect object. This is where leur comes in. Lui (pronom conjoint) is invariable in person, but varies in number:

Je parle à mon ami(e) → je lui parle. 

Je parle à mes ami(e)s → je leur parle.

Y is invariable, but lui (pronom disjoint) varies in both number and person:

Je pense à mon ami → je pense à lui.

Je pense à mon amie → je pense à elle.

Je pense à mes amis → je pense à eux.

Je pense à mes amies → je pense à elles.

Sidenote: leur can also be the third person plural possessive (their). Like all the other possessives, it varies in number: leur and leurs. 

Direct and Indirect Object

Direct Object

-          Direct objects are nouns, pronouns, clauses or phrases that follows the verb in a sentence. You can identify the direct object by using this simple formula: subject + verb + who? or what? = DIRECT OBJECT

Confusing direct objects with subject complements

A subject complement is a clause or phrase that follows a linking verb, such as is, are or was, and complements, or completes, the subject of a sentence by describing or renaming it. If the verb is a linking one, the word that answers the question “what” or “who” is a subject complement.

Take note that only action verbs can have direct object

Indirect Object

-          Indirect objects are nouns or pronouns that identify who or what is receiving the direct object. The indirect object typically precedes the direct object and is identified by asking who or what received the direct object.

Classifications of Verbs

Transitive and Intransitive Verb

Transitive verbs are action verbs that have an object to receive that action.

Intransitive verbs are action verbs but unlike transitive verbs, they do not have an object receiving the action.

Linking verbs

Unlike action verbs, linking verbs show a relationship between the subject of the sentence and a noun or adjective being linked to it.

The most common linking verbs are forms of the verb to be: am, is, are, was, were, being, been.

Other common linking verbs include: appear, become, feel, grow, look, remain, seem, smell, sound, stay, taste, and turn.

When he asks her a question, her eyes skitter, panicked, across the page, and she spits out words as she sees them in the text, hopping from one important-sounding word to the next, stringing together sentences with incorrect prepositions, running across the bridge of her answer as it collapses under her.

-- Susan McCarty

Today at apt, we've got the second installment of Susan McCarty's "Indirect Object," replete with reality TV references, fictional standardized test answers, and...a missing student.