Teach me extensively about subject, object, and indirect object in grammar

"I bought my dog a toy"

:0

"I bought my dog" still means something else

>Teach me extensively about subject, object, and indirect object in grammar.

The key is in the Verb, OP. Look at the action of the verb. Indirect objects get a little complicated when you get to transitive and intransitive verbs, but just start with the basics for now. Look at the action of the verb. Who or what is 'doing' the verb and who/what is having the verb done to them?

"user made a post"

user is the subject for user is making. The post is the object for the post had 'making' done to it by user.

The subject is the thing doing the verb.the subject causes the action of the verb. The object is the recipient. The object receives the action of the verb.

Tom kicked the dog, Tom smoked a cigar, Tom ate an apple. In all three, Tom is the subject, and the object follows the verb, receiving the action of it.

Now, OP, challenge for you; what do you think were to happen if we were to reverse the structure of the sentences?

>From: Tom kicked the dog, Tom smoked a cigar, Tom ate an apple
>to: The dog was kicked by Tom, A cigar was smoked by Tom, An apple was eaten by Tom.

What do you think is happening here? From Who ate my apple? to my apple was eaten by whom?

Second challenge. Try to reverse something a little bit harder, like: Tom drove his car into a tree

But that is a complete thought in itself, so syntactically incompatible with "a toy." Therefore there is only one way to interpret the sentence in its entirety.

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Most of the answers in this thread is wrong, because they're defining Subject Verb and Object semantically -- in other words, based on meaning with regard to the verb. Ex: 'Subject causes the verb', 'Object receives the action' etc.

In fact, despite what you're taught in elementary school, grammatical relations are not defined semantically; these are two more or less separate 'linguistic levels'. The point of syntax is that it is relatively independent of meaning: Thus Chomsky's (1957) famous 'Colourless green ideas sleep furiously', a sentence which is syntactically well formed, but semantically meaningless, as opposed to 'Furiously sleep ideas green colourless', which is syntactically ill-formed.

Now, the grammatical relations of words are defined by their structural position in the utterance (essentially, word order). Every language has a basic word order, which can be deviated from more or less depending on structural properties of the language. The basic word order of English is SVO, which in its case is relatively fixed. For example, in 'John threw the ball', S='John', V='threw', and O='ball'.

How about the passive form, which would seem to invert the basic word order? (1). 'The ball was thrown by John'. Although the nouns have switched places, the word order is still SVO. Why? because the fundamental structure of the sentence has not been inverted with the nouns: it is exactly the same as a regular main clause in English, only with an auxiliary 'was' (which only makes overt the previously covert I-position -- explaining I-position is beyond the scope of this post). For proof of this, consider (2). 'The ball was thrown'. If 'ball' was the object in (1), then there would be no subject in (2), which is impossible.

Here's a good (and free!) online resource to learn more about syntax: ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/syntax-textbook/

Sources:
Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic structures (Janua linguarum. Series minor ; 4). The Hague: Mouton.
Adger, D. (2003). Core syntax : A minimalist approach (Core linguistics). Oxford, [England] ; New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press.
Lyons, J. (1971). New horizons in linguistics. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

You seem to know your shit; I've read conflicting accounts of the move from French structuralism to Chomskyian grammar—does he retain, expand, or critique Saussure's notion of the negative value of the sign?

Good post. So basically you are saying this user here is wrong to call the phrase "my dog" the indirect object? As it is linked to the rest of the sentence by the preposition "for", this noun phrase is actually called the object of the preposition. But in this arrangement, , there is no preposition, so it would be correct to call it an indirect object (despite the sentences being semantically equivalent).

Chomsky doesn't really explicitly address structuralism as much as he simply takes a different approach -- it had become evident that structural syntax (eg Bloomfield's 'Language', 1933; 'syntagm' vs 'paradigm'; etc.) was simply inadequate for explaining what was and was not grammatical in a given language.

However Chomsky still retains a deep implication of fundamental structural principles, such as in the definitions of a constituent, category, etc, which are essentially based on 'minimal contrast'. However he certainly accepts the basic notion of a sign, its arbitrariness, etc.)

No, is correct to call 'my dog' the IO in the sense that it is a 3rd argument to the verb. In 'my dog' is also an IO due to the lack of a preposition before 'a toy', thus leaving only one possibility of meaning. If it were 'I bought my dog for a toy', this sounds weird, but is still grammatically well-formed, and 'toy' would become the IO.

You should think of syntax less in the sense of what to call a given constituent, and more in the sense of where that constituent is in the structure of the utterance. What I didn't explain in this post was that syntactic structure is much more complex than simple linear order of the words; it is in fact 2-dimensional. When I'm analysing these sentences I'm thinking in terms of that 2D structure with regard to how English works. It's impossible to fully explain this in a Veeky Forums post. You should check out the link I posted above.

Thanks!

serious reply

Subject performs action on object.

Example: I (subject) eat (action) burgers (object).

Indirect object is preceded by a word like "to." Think of the indirect object as the recipient of the action, rather than the thing being acted on.

Example: I (subject) give (action) presents (object) to Seymour (indirect object).

Only for the active voice