>However,
>intransitive verbs may take a direct complement in another case, as is
>especially common with a dative, e.g. PROSKUNEW in the sense of "worship"
>will most normally take a dative of the one worshipped, in which case we'd
>call that dative word a direct complement
At this point, I'm tempted to do what my German teacher did: introduce direct object / indirect object as one of those false generalizations, ignore the terms direct complement / indirect complement, and mention that the complements of verbs may take specific cases due to the sense of those verbs (and that a lexicon like BAGD will give the cases of the various complements of a verb).
I can see how verbal complements describe the data better than direct/indirect object, but I don't see the advantage of calling things direct/indirect complements rather than direct/indirect objects, and I don't think that people will encounter the terms direct/indirect complements in reference works or other grammars.
Does this seem like a reasonable approach?
>One of the most annoying things to a student in the early stages of
>learning a language must be the fact that different teachers or
>grammarians use different terminology for the same grammatical
>constructions.
I'm considering the possibility of adding another annoying new term.
EMOI, it seems that many of the uses of the accusative have to do with motion towards something or into something, the motion being implied also by either a preposition or by a verb. If I were to introduce only two categories for the accusative, I would be tempted to introduce (1) accusative for direct objects, (2) accusative of motion (or perhaps "accusative of approach").
Do you think this would be a helpful description?
Jonathan