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In linguistics, an object is any of several types of arguments.For descriptions of the traditional distinction between subject and object, see for instance Freeborn (1995:31) and Kesner Bland (1996:415). In subject-prominent, nominative-accusative languages such as English language, a transitive verb typically distinguishes between its subject and any of its objects, which can include but are not limited to direct objects, indirect objects, and arguments of adpositions (prepositions or postpositions); the latter are more accurately termed oblique arguments, thus including other arguments not covered by core grammatical roles, such as those governed by Grammatical case (as in languages such as Latin) or (as is typical for members of the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area). In ergative-absolutive languages, for example most Australian Aboriginal languages, the term "subject" is ambiguous, and thus the term "agent" is often used instead to contrast with "object", such that basic word order is described as agent–object–verb (AOV) instead of subject–object–verb (SOV). Topic-prominent languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, focus their grammars less on the subject-object or agent-object dichotomies but rather on the Pragmatics dichotomy of topic and comment.
| She sees the dog |
| I gave the man salt |
| You fish for salmon |
Indirect objects are frequently expressed as objects of prepositions, complicating the traditional typology; e.g. "I gave salt to the man."
Secundative languages lack a distinction between direct and indirect objects, but rather distinguish primary and secondary objects. Many African languages fall into this typological category.
Several Slavic languages and agglutinating languages (e.g. Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish) use their case systems to differentiate between direct and indirect objects. The former is usually expressed in the accusative case, while the latter in the dative or allative case. Because of the structure of dative words in Hungarian, indirect objects are rather categorised as adjuncts, not objects.
| The girl ate fruit. |
| We remembered that we had to bring something. |
| We remembered we had to bring something. |
| We were waiting for him to explain. |
| They asked what had happened. |
| I heard what you heard. |
| He stopped asking questions. |
| Sam attempted to leave. |
| I believe it that she said that. |
| The student submitted his homework to the teacher. |
Languages vary significantly with respect to these criteria. The first criterion identifies objects reliably most of the time in English, e.g.
The second criterion is also a reliable criterion for analytic languages such as English, since the relatively strict word order of English usually positions the object after the verb(s) in declarative sentences. In the majority of languages with fixed word order, the subject precedes the object. However, the opposite is true for the very small proportion (approximately 2.9%) of the world's languages that utilize object–subject word order by default.
| I fed the dog. |
| You lent me a lawnmower. |
| I'll trade you this bicycle for your binoculars. quoting |
| The man stumbled twice, The roof collapsed. |
| He works in the morning, They lie often. |
Ergative verbConcerning ergative verbs, see for instance the Collins Cobuild English Grammar (1995:155f.) and Biber et al. (1999:155f.). and object-deletion verbsThe term object-deletion verb is adopted from Biber et al. (1999:147). Such verbs are also called ambitransitive. can be transitive or intransitive, as indicated in the following table:
| The submarine sank the freighter. |
| We have already eaten dinner. |
| The freighter sank. |
| We have already eaten. |
The distinction drawn here between ergative and object-deletion verbs is based on the role of the subject. The object of a transitive ergative verb is the subject of the corresponding intransitive ergative verb. With object-deletion verbs, in contrast, the subject is consistent regardless of whether an object is or is not present.
The subject is in blue, and the object in orange. The subject is consistently a dependent of the finite verb, whereas the object is a dependent of the lowest non-finite verb if such a verb is present.
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