- DIRECT AND INDIRECT OBJECTS
There are mainly two types of objects, Direct Objects and Indirect Objects.
The question about Direct and Indirect Objects arises only in the case of a sentence having two objects.
Before explaining it, let’s just go through the given sentence.
Mathew gave Mary a diamond necklace.
Here we can see the given sentence has two objects, they are ‘Mary’ and ‘a diamond necklace’.
This puzzle can be solved by asking four types of questions to the sentence such as ‘what ?’, ‘whom ?’, ‘to what ? ‘, or ‘to whom ?’
- To find out direct Object, just ask the question ‘what ?’ or ‘whom ?’ to the sentence.
Here we get the answer ‘a diamond necklace’ as the direct object , when we ask the question ‘what’ to the sentence. ( The question ‘whom ?’ is irrelevant here, as the direct object ‘a diamond necklace‘ is not a person)
- To find out Indirect Object, just ask the question ‘to whom ?’ or ‘to what ?’ to the sentence.
We get the answer ‘Mary’ as the ‘Indirect Object’ of the sentence here, when we ask the question ‘to whom ?’ to the sentence. ( As the indirect object ‘Mary’ is a person , there is no relevance for asking the question ‘to what ?‘ here.)
Let’s write another example,
His father presented ‘Tony’ ‘a beautiful birthday gift’
Here the direct object is “a beautiful birthday gift” and the Indirect object is “Tony”.
- PREPOSITIONAL OBJECTS
(It is not widely recognized. Yet mentioned here for an awareness)
Objects followed by prepositions are known as Prepositional Objects.
eg: Merin was waiting “for Thomas”.
Here the object ‘Thomas’ is followed by the preposition ‘for’.
Two more examples :
We always dream ”of a peaceful world”
He is thinking ‘of his lover’
So we have studied about direct and indirect objects, and also about prepositional objects in detail
