Re: direct and indirect object (was: Learning a language)

From: Nathan Sanders (nsanders.DIE.SPAM_at_wso.williams.edu)
Date: 07/07/04 

Date: Wed, 07 Jul 2004 16:03:43 GMT

In article <20040707061829.26512.00001243@mb-m03.aol.com>,
 uiesperanto@aol.com (Dmitri) wrote:

> >From: Nathan Sanders
>
> >Does this rule work for all double object verbs in English?
>
> I'm sure that because you're asking this you have at least one that does not
> in mind,

Far far more than one, actually...

> ready to be whipped out with an attendant "AHA!" the minute I say
> "yes"...........

In fact, in my very next sentence (which you even quoted!), I offered
up three counterexamples that I was thinking of. they're *right
there*, so I wasn't trying to be sneaky. Just trying to get you to
see a possible error in your rule *on your own*.

> >What are
> >the direct and indirect objects in "I bet John five dollars that it
> >would rain tomorrow"? "I baked John a cake"? "I asked John a
> >question"?
>
> In each, John is the IO, the other noun is the DO.

So, according to your rule, these can be revised to:

(1) I bet five dollars to John that it would rain tomorrow.
(2) I baked a cake to John.
(3) I asked a question to John.

In my dialect of English, I use "with" in (1), "for" in (2), and
mostly "of" in (3) in the very rare cases where I use this
connstruction at all for _ask_, instead of the prepositionless double
object consturction.

So in your dialect, you use "to" for all of them? Interesting.

> >And do all English double object constructions translate to Esperanto
> >in the same way (accusative "direct object" + <al> + "indirect
> >object")?
>
> Since they are IO's, yes they could be translated with "al".......though some
> will no doubt argue that: I've seen IOs translated with "al" "de" and "por"
> depending on the meaning.

Depending on the meaning, or depending on the verb? In English, verbs
with essentially the same meaning (like _look_ and _see_) treat their
objects differently: _look at X_ versus _see X_.

> >Or French, or German, or Mandarin, or any other language?
>
> Depends on the rules of these other languages.

So the rule, and thus the treatment of "direct" and "indirect"
objects, is in fact not a universal thing, and would have to be
learned from language to language (assuming each language even has a
single rule)?

This goes back to my original question in this subthread --- how does
one know what is a "direct" object in the language? The answer it now
seems you should have provided was "you have to memorize it for each
language", rather than gobbledygoook you made up about "knowing it".

Nathan 

-- 
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program       nsanders@wso.williams.edu                           
Williams College          http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders
Williamstown, MA 01267

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