- Fred bought his mother a present.
- Fred bought his mother.
From this analysis, it appears that ditransitive verbs require two objects in
most situations. The fact that there are some ditransitives, such asask,that al-
low us to drop the direct object without changing the grammatical relations or
the meaning of the sentence is coincidental and trivial.
Indirect Objects as Phrases. An interesting feature of indirect objects
is that they can appear as a noun phrase or as a phrase that usually begins with
the wordto(a prepositional phrase). Thus, this single construction has two pos-
sible structures, as illustrated here:
- Fred senthis mothera card.
40b. Fred sent a card tohis mother.
In sentence 40b,his motheris the indirect object, even though it is part of a
(prepositional) phrase. The following sentences offer further examples of these
equivalent structures:
- Buggsy asked Fritz a question/Buggsy asked a question of Fritz
- Macarena gave Buggsy a kiss/Macarena gave a kiss to Buggsy
- Fritz told Rita a story/Fritz told a story to Rita
- Buggsy wrote the gang a note/Buggsy wrote a note to the gang
- Raul left Rita a present/Raul left a present for Rita
- Rita showed Fred her earrings/Rita showed her earrings to Fred
Teaching Tip
Native speakers of Spanish tend to structure indirect objects as prepositional
phrases rather than as noun phrases. An effective way of building students’
skills and expanding their sentence variety is to ask them to:- exchange papers.
- circle all instances of the word “to” that introduce an indirect object.
- revise sentences to turn the construction into a simple noun phrase.
Note that “to” does not always introduce an indirect object. When followed by
a verb, for example, it has a very different function.
Linking Verbs
Earlier, we saw that verbs describe an action or are existential. Sentence 2—
The tree was tall—illustrates how the verbwasexpresses existence, or a state of
being. We give such verbs a special classification:linking verbs.Linking verbs
76 CHAPTER 3