In linguistics, an object pronoun is a personal pronoun that is used typically as a grammatical object: the direct or indirect object of a verb, or the object of a preposition. Object pronouns contrast with . Object pronouns in English take the Oblique case, sometimes called the oblique case or object case.[Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik, A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (London: Longman, 1985), p. 337.]
For example, the English object pronoun me is found in "They see me" (direct object), "He's giving me my book" (indirect object), and "Sit with me" (object of a preposition); this contrasts with the subject pronoun in " I see them," " I am getting my book," and " I am sitting here."
English
The English personal and interrogative pronouns have the following subject and object forms:
Archaic second person forms
Historically,
Middle English and Early Modern English retained the T–V distinction; the second person pronoun had separate singular/familiar and plural/formal forms with subject and object forms of both. In standard modern forms of English, all second person forms have been reduced to simply "you". These forms are still retained (sometimes partially) in some dialects of Northern English,
Scottish English, and in the
Scots language, a Germanic language closely related to English which diverged from it during the Early Modern period.
Other languages
In some languages the
direct object pronoun and the
indirect object pronoun have separate forms. For example, in the Spanish object pronoun system,
direct object:
Lo mandaron a la escuela (They sent
him to school) and
indirect object:
Le mandaron una carta (They sent
him a letter). Other languages divide object pronouns into a larger variety of classes.
On the other hand, many languages, for example Persian, do not have distinct object pronouns:
Man Farsi balad-am (I can speak Persian language). Man ra mishenasad. (He knows
me).
History
Object pronouns, in languages where they are distinguished from subject pronouns, are typically a vestige of an older
Grammatical case system. English, for example, once had an extensive
declension system that specified distinct
accusative case and
dative case case
forms for both nouns and pronouns. And after a preposition, a noun or pronoun could be in either of these cases, or in the
genitive case or instrumental cases. With the exception of the genitive (the "apostrophe-s" form), in nouns this system disappeared entirely, while in personal pronouns it collapsed into a single case, covering the roles of both accusative and dative, as well as all instances after a preposition. That is, the new oblique (object) case came to be used for the object of either a verb or a preposition, contrasting with the genitive, which links two nouns.
For a discussion of the use of historically object pronouns in subject position in English (e.g. "Jay and me will arrive later"), see the article on English personal pronouns.
See also
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Object (grammar)
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Subject (grammar)
