> At 09:02 AM 11/20/97 -0600, Carl William Conrad wrote:
>
> >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?
Well, yes, as far as it goes. The problem is that (a) the notion of a
direct object is so indelibly linked to an accusative case that it may be
difficult to get people thinking about a direct "object" in the dative or
genitive case--and it does sound a bit odd; and (b) "object" disguises the
fact that the grammatical function of the word used as a direct complement
of a verb is structural and bears no necessary relationship to external
reality. You may very well say that the apple which Eve ate "received" the
action of eating, but it's not so easy when you say "I gave the chair a
kick" and attempt to translate that into "a kick" received the action of
the verb "give." The term "object" seems to imply that our linguistic
construction actually reflects the structure of external reality, whereas
in many cases it does not.
> > >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?
One of the most helpful things to me that I learned from Joshua Whatmough
years ago was to think of the accusative as the "adverbial" case just as
one should think of the "true" or "pertinentive" genitive as an
"adnominal" case; which is to say, the accusative case tends to turn a
noun into an adverb indicating the LIMIT of a verb (most frequently), an
adjective (not infrequently), or an adverb (not nearly so often)--just as
the "pertinentive" or "true" genitive case tends to turn a noun into an
adjective delimiting in some way another noun. Limit especially seems
useful as a fundamental notion in understanding the accusative, however:
where a verb comes to its limit, where an extension of space or time comes
to its limit, just exactly how far the applicability of an adverb may
reach.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/