Object (grammar) - Types of Object

Types of Object

Objects fall into classes: direct objects, adpositional objects, and non-prepositional indirect objects. A direct object answers the question "What?", while an indirect object answers the question "To whom?" or "For whom?". An indirect object is the recipient of the direct object, or an otherwise affected participant in the event. There must be a direct object for an indirect object to be placed in a sentence. Some examples:

• In "The girl ate fruit", fruit is a direct object of the verb ate. It corresponds to the accusative of languages with grammatical cases.
• In "They sent him a postcard", him is a (non-prepositional) indirect object of the verb sent (which uses a double-object construction). It typically corresponds to the dative case.
• In "I envied him his success", his success is an oblique object of the verb envied (it could be expressed for his success instead).
• In "We listened to the radio", radio is the object of the preposition to, and the prepositional object of the simple past of the phrasal verb to listen to. It can correspond to a variety of cases and complements.

In many languages, including German, Latin, and Classical Arabic, objects can change form slightly (decline) to indicate what kind of object they are (their case). This does not happen in English (except for a few pronouns that do have separate subject and object forms, such as he versus him); rather, the type of object is indicated strictly by word order. Also, some objects are treated differently from others in particular languages. In Spanish, for example, human objects have to get a preposition 'a'. This is called differential object marking.