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In the sentence "They told me that" or "They told me so" OR even much better sentence from one of the provisional answer "She taught me Spanish"
I hope to get some confirmation and this is really language agnostic, I mean to talk about the semantic underlying in the text. Thank you.
As Atamiri points out, it is the direct object in the first example and me is the indirect object in the second example. The traditional explanation is that the direct object is acted upon directly, and the indirect object is affected by the action more or less indirectly. But be aware that these traditional explanations do not always work. There are instances where it is difficult to view the one or the other object as indirect or direct, e.g. She taught him Spanish -- in this case, it is difficult to view him as "indirect", since the the "him" is being directly influenced by the teaching.
him is indeed indirect object and Spanish direct object, correct?
Mar 18, 2015 at 11:22
Since English has no way to mark the accusative case explicitly, the only way to tell the direct object is to find an object without a preposition before it. In your sentence neither object has a preposition, so there is no way you can deny that both objects are direct, at least formally, judging by their form and the syntax of the whole sentence. Because of this, English is a language that can have two direct objects of a verb, and that can easily be proved: She taught him Spanish has 2 direct objects, if you remove one of them you can easily see that:
She taught him. - "him" is the direct object.
She taught Spanish. - "Spanish" is the direct object.
If you abstragate from the formal grammar and look at the meaning of the words and at the situation described in the sentence, it is easy to find out what the action is directed at and who it is intended for, but anyway this difference is not expressed in the English sentence. The order in which the objects are put after the verb doesn't tell about their nature, if a verb has two direct objects we can easily transform the sentence so that to make each of the objects indirect:
She taught Spanish to him. - "to him" is the indirect object.
She taught him about Spanish. - "about Spanish" is the indirect object.
That is why the very idea of a distinction between the direct vs. indirect object becomes vanishingly vague when we speak about English.
She taught him about Spanish does not have Spanish as indirect object. Spanish is simply a prepositional object anchored on the preposition about. In similar sentence "They talked with me about him" does not have any indirect object. Both me and him are simply prepositional objects in my view.
Mar 18, 2015 at 11:57
The direct object is the noun phrase immediately after the verb. That's the one that can be passivized (usually).
They told me that. (I was told that.)
They told me so. (?I was told so.)
She taught me Spanish. (I was taught Spanish.)
Some people also allow omission of the "to" of an indirect object in passives (which is confusing):
They told that to me. (That was told (to) me.)
She taught Spanish to me. (Spanish was taught (to) me.)
The indirect object is the noun phrase after "to". I am partial to the Relational Grammar account which derives the double object construction by promoting an indirect object to a direct object (and demoting the former direct object to Chomeur).
me in your examples are not direct objects, but indirect
Mar 19, 2015 at 5:34
me is indirect object and the that is direct object. That makes thing much better than having a no grammatical relation on that.
Mar 19, 2015 at 7:33
I was given a book by them from They gave a book to me.
Mar 21, 2015 at 2:55