Saturday, November 28, 2015

grammar - Can a clause have more than one (in)direct object?

I am fairly convinced that any English clause (and it probably also counts for other languages, but I can't be sure about that) can only contain 1 subject, 1 direct object, and 1 indirect object. This seems lower-grade common knowledge to me, but I don't know if this is an official rule and I can't really find any linguistic authoritative source that says so. Is this indeed true? And if not, what would be a counterexample?




Obviously, a sentence can have a compound subject/object such as in:




John and Mary are walking down the street.




But in that case, I would argue that there is 1 subject that is "John and Mary".

No comments:

Post a Comment