5

"I gave him two dollars."

This tacitly means "to him". Are there exceptions to the rule that an indirect object in English always means "to" or "for"?

In English, "I stole him two dollars" does not mean "I stole two dollars from him", and one does not say "I withheld him that information" (either of those usages would be valid in German).

Michael Hardy
  • 2,506
  • 1
    "I stole him two dollars" would mean "for him", I guess. – Mr Lister Jun 01 '14 at 20:31
  • 1
    Indirect objects in English are much more restrictive than in many other languages that have them, being licensed essentially by the individual verb and/or idiom directly. In ‘look someone in the eye’ or ‘stand someone a drink’, for example, it does not correspond to any prepositional phrase—it can only be used as an indirect object. You cannot ‘look in the eye for/to someone’ or ‘stand a drink to/for someone’. I can’t currently think of any contexts where an indirect object could be transposed to a prepositional phrase with a preposition that isn’t either to or for, though. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jun 01 '14 at 20:59
  • 1
    @Peter They’re indirect. For your test, try deleting whatever comes after the “somebody” argument. If the sentence holds together, it’s direct, but if not, it’s indirect. With “I hit him on the chin” > “I hit him”, the key sense remains unchanged. With “look somebody in the eye” > “look somebody” just as with “look somebody over” > “look somebody”, it no longer makes sense without a preposition inserted between the two words. Therefore the body involved could never have served as the direct object. – tchrist Jun 01 '14 at 21:49
  • I had thought that in English (unlike German), a verb never has an indirect object unless it also has a direct object. This example of "look someone in the eye" seems to be a counterexample. I wouldn't have noticed it was an indirect object without thinking about "look someone" without the phrase that follows it. – Michael Hardy Jun 01 '14 at 23:24
  • 1
    Um... what? look over and look in the eye are idiomatic (or phrasal) verbs, they mean something different from look by itself (among other things, they are transitive and take direct objects, while look is not), so of course if you drop the adverb the sentence no longer makes sense. somebody is still the direct object. It might make sense to stand a drink for someone, on the other hand, though it would sound odd. – Wlerin Jun 02 '14 at 01:24
  • 1
    @Wlerin Look over is obviously a phrasal verb. Look/stare/gawk/etc. [someone] in the [body part] is most definitely not a phrasal verb. It is an idiomatic template that can be used quite productively and just happens to include an indirect object. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jun 02 '14 at 09:00

1 Answers1

5

No.

There are verbs that take two objects that won’t let you blindly transform this:

  • verb   indirect-object   direct-object

into this

  • verb   direct-object   to/for   indirect-object

and be left with legal or meaningful sentences. Some of these are:

  • Pardon me my reach.
  • I forgave her the entire incident.
  • I envied him his easy smile.
  • I begrudged him his easy smile.
  • The falling dish pail struck him a good solid knock.
  • I excused him the mud on his shoes.
  • I forbade him further admittance.
  • You cannot permit them full run of the place.
  • I denied him his request.

If you look back a few hundred years, you’ll find many more instances of this sort of thing which are now obsolete because they don’t sound right to us anymore. The Old English dative was not so cut and dry as to always convey a to/for relationship. The dative is the “interested” party here.

tchrist
  • 134,759
  • 3
    These are exceptions to Dative Alternation. Note that all of them either refer to emotional judgements (envy, begrudge, excuse) rather than to transfers, or are extensions of simple transitive verbs (struck him a knock = knocked him; landed him a blow = struck him, etc). There are some 3 place verbs that don't refer to transfer (elect him president), and they don't do Dative Alternation, either. But if there's a transfer, they usually do. – John Lawler Jun 01 '14 at 22:28
  • 2
    "His wife deemed him a lost cause" doesn't have an indirect object at all. "Him" is the direct object and "a lost cause" is either an objective complement or a predicate nominative. – Michael Hardy Jun 01 '14 at 23:26
  • "I'll sport you a twenty" does seem to mean "to" or "for". – Michael Hardy Jun 01 '14 at 23:26
  • @JohnLawler : Are you really saying that in "elect him president" there's an indirect object? – Michael Hardy Jun 01 '14 at 23:28
  • . . . ok, maybe you weren't saying that. – Michael Hardy Jun 01 '14 at 23:31
  • OK, in "His wife deemed him a lost cause", the phrase "a lost cause" is an objective complement. I think "predicate nominative" comes to mind simply because those phrases would be nominative in Esperanto. – Michael Hardy Jun 01 '14 at 23:54
  • But "to" is used with "forbid" and "permit": "Nothing was forbidden to him", etc. – Michael Hardy Jun 01 '14 at 23:55
  • 2
    I said they were three place verbs, not that they were indirect objects. And can to really be used with permit? He permitted the use of the penthouse to her. I'd star it, though forbid does allow to. Permit and forbid can take infinitive complements, of course: She forbids/permits you to go to the dance. But that to is the infinitive marker, not a dative marker. – John Lawler Jun 02 '14 at 00:15
  • How about "That was permitted to her."? – Michael Hardy Jun 02 '14 at 00:28
  • So when you say these are exceptions to Dative Alternation, what you mean is that the indirect object is in the third spot rather than the second, yes? Thus, I forgave her **for** the entire incident, I envied him **for** his easy smile; and I excused him **for** the mud on his shoes, etc. A few of the sentences can't be changed like this, but it's nonetheless rather obvious that the first noun is not the indirect object (struck him, forbade him, etc.). What the second noun is in these cases I do not know. – Wlerin Jun 02 '14 at 01:34
  • For details like these, you probly want to look at Levin's English Verb Classes and Alternations. There are a number of subclasses. – John Lawler Jun 02 '14 at 02:53
  • I've seen 'She led him a merry dance' analysed as a ditransitive structure, but the conclusion a few of us came to was that it's a poor, look-alike, analysis. One person argued that there was a 'syntactic' rather than 'semantic object' involved. Messy. It's almost certainly an ellipted form: 'She led him [along] in/on a merry dance', with 'a merry dance' an adverbial objective. Cf 'She led him home'. – Edwin Ashworth Jun 02 '14 at 08:25
  • In "I envied him his drive and enthusiasm", either object may be deleted. I've seen this described as a rare S-V-DO-DO construction. This hinges, of course, on the related senses available for the verb envy: to envy someone (for something) and to envy something (possessed by someone). – Edwin Ashworth Jun 02 '14 at 08:36
  • @Wlerin You're transforming the direct objects here. The phrases are exceptions to dative alternation because the indirect object cannot alternate with a prepositional object. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jun 02 '14 at 09:05
  • @Edwin Why would that have to be S-V-DO-DO? There are several ditransitive verbs that can also be monotransitive; envy just differs in that it has two semantic uses as a monotransitive verb, and the DO can represent either the DO or the IO in the ditransitive use. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jun 02 '14 at 09:10
  • @Janus Applying the deletion test tchrist gives in a comment above. The 3-place construction with 'envy' doesn't match the typical 'transfer' implication of the usual ditransitive construction. The problem of well-defining DOs and IOs is neither simple nor deemed truly solved. – Edwin Ashworth Jun 02 '14 at 09:38
  • @Edwin I don't think that test works with envy or begrudge (or similar verbs), simply because their monotransitive uses can have as their DO both the thing envied and the person the thing envied is associated with. Two fundamentally different lexemes, really. It is more coincidence than anything that there happens to be a ditransitive usage where the DO and the IO each corresponds to one of the monotransitive lexemes. I don't see why that would make the ditransitive usage contain two DOs, any more than in “He wrote me a letter”, which is entirely parallel. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jun 02 '14 at 09:42
  • @Janus Not semantically. The fact that the definition of 'ditransitive' is partly semantic is key here: 'In grammar, a ditransitive verb is a verb which takes a subject and two objects which refer to a theme and a recipient' [Wikipedia] In 'He envied John his looks' it seems we have none of the 'transfer' usually associated with the ditransitive structure. I'm not at all saying I agree with the S-V-DO-DO analysis, but I'm saying that I find an S-V-IO-DO analysis dubious too. This whole area needs overhauling; Aarts and others have made a start. – Edwin Ashworth Jun 02 '14 at 10:28
  • @JanusBahsJacquet If I can transform a "direct" object into a to/for prepositional phrase, then it wasn't a direct object... The most straightforward analysis of half of these is S-V-DO-IO. (The other half are weird and I have no comment on them.) – Wlerin Jun 02 '14 at 11:52
  • 1
    @Wlerin Says who? I’d say S-V-DO-IO is a very non-straightforward analysis, since that word order is not usually permitted except dialectally when both objects are enclitic pronouns. It is much simpler to say that there are simply some constructions where indirect objects cannot undergo dative alternation, and consider verbs like forgive as varyingly mono- and ditransitive (which we already know they are anyway), with the monotransitive use also licensing a prepositional complement that happens to use a preposition that also appears in dative alternation. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jun 02 '14 at 12:27
  • @JanusBahsJacquet Another “odd” old construct, one allegedly still with some currency northwards of Hadrian’s Wall, is the standard S-V-IO-DO but where DO is an enclitic pronoun yet IO is not. Think of the old Jacobite rhyme: O what’s the rhyme for porringer? / Ken ye the rhyme to porringer? / The King he had a daughter fair, / And gave the Prince of Orange her.** – tchrist Jun 02 '14 at 14:09
  • @JanuhsBahsJacquet I concede that my superficial analysis was incorrect. I still have some difficulty identifying the first object in most of these examples as an indirect object. It seems in these cases (excluding struck) that the first object is interpreted as a non-receiving possessor--it already possesses the direct object and does not receive it from the action of the verb. This appears to fit the Old English use of the dative, but I am not convinced it fits the Modern English criteria for an indirect object. – Wlerin Jun 03 '14 at 09:19