What are objective pronouns used with - direct or indirect objects?

January 8, 2011 10:53 PM

When a sentence uses more than one object, how are objective pronouns used with them? Common sense would say that they are only relevant to the direct object, but what if I want to refer to the indirect object? Hardcore grammar-mining ahead!

Here's an example sentence to work with:

John pulled the gun out of the holster and aimed it at Alex.

Here, 'it' is the objective pronoun, 'gun' is the direct object and 'the holster' is, to my understanding the indirect object, as is 'Alex'.
If so, what does the above example mean? Did John aim the gun at Alex, or did he aim the holster at Alex?
The more 'obvious' meaning would be that he aimed the gun at Alex. But what if I intended the sentence to mean that he aimed the holster at Alex, without specifying that he discarded the gun?

Simply changing the nouns and verbs can change the meaning the sentence implies, even though the subjects, objects and pronouns stay in place:

John pulled plastic cover off of his phone and tossed it to Alex.

Here, 'plastic cover' is the direct object, while 'phone' is the indirect object. The sentence structure remains the same.
Common sense would imply that John tossed the phone to Alex, but is that what the sentence really says? Or did John toss the plastic cover? If so, then what would you say if he wanted to toss the phone instead?

posted by Senza Volto to Writing & Language (21 answers total)

That's interesting. I wonder if there are real rules, or if it's always just been contextual. (Well, "always" as much as something can be in English.)
posted by shabaabk at 11:07 PM on January 8, 2011

I'm surprised no one else has jumped all over this. First of all, you may want to brush up on your understanding of direct and indirect objects. In the first sentence, ask yourself what is the verb? That would be pulled. The subject is John. what did John pull? Not the holster, but the gun. Obviously. But where you're running off track here is that you're mistaking holster for an indirect object, which it is not; it is the object of the preposition, which is a different animal altogether. In fact, in the writing center where I work, we often encourage students to start to understand their sentence structure by crossing out all prepositional phrases. In your second sentence, which as you've noted is just like your first, the object of the verb (pulled) is "cover" (which just happens to be plastic). Once again, "phone" is the object of the preposition, not any kind of object of the verb. Does this make sense?
posted by miss patrish at 11:14 PM on January 8, 2011

I'm not a syntactician (but I am a linguist)...what you're referring to is a form of ambiguity involving deixis. There's a more exact term for this particular phenomenon and there have been quite a few studies showing what can condition or skew the hard read over the easy one — I just saw one published the other day in the Journal of Psycholinguistics, involving experiments with resolving the ambiguity wrt syntactic gapping - which is a similar phenomenon in a sense (involving elision - in this case of verbal elements instead of internal grammatical structures).

Maybe a syntactician can jump in with some more exact info here. I'm out of my depth quickly.

As far as restructuring the sentence, you could go with something clunkier, but less ambiguous like:
John, pulling the plastic cover off first, tossed his phone to Alex.

Either way, you have the main action (tossing the phone) and the time sequence deeply embedded in later structures in the sentence...it is going to make for a tricky read. If you can disambiguate the temporal aspect (using words like first, after, before, etc.) and restructure the grammatical elements so that the main events are first, with relevant/subordinating clauses closer to and/or following the clauses they directly modify, you'll go a long way. Ex. John tossed the phone to Alex after he pulled the plastic cover off of it first.
posted by iamkimiam at 11:26 PM on January 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: @miss patrish:
Interesting. Either we weren't taught that in school, or I missed those lectures. I always assumed that an object has to be connected to a verb at the bare minimum. Googling 'object of the preposition' throws up a plethora of results. After struggling a bit with examples, I think I have a loose hang of the difference between indirect and prepositional objects now.

I typed him a letter with OpenOffice and sent it via e-mail. (Bizarre-ish example, but it serves the purpose)

Subject: I
Verb: Typed
Direct object: Letter
Indirect object: Him
Prepositional object: OpenOffice

And in this case, 'it' would invariably refer to the letter (especially since whoever 'him' is, cannot be addressed to as an 'it').

Here's a different one then:

I sent John a messenger and asked him to deliver the message.

Same as before, except 'messenger' is our new direct object. So when I 'asked him', did I ask the messenger or did I ask John to deliver the message? (Going to back to the original, but now-slightly-clarified question of whether the objective pronoun addresses the direct or indirect object)

And to further this, what about prepositional objects any way? Are they referred to using objective pronouns at all?
posted by Senza Volto at 11:48 PM on January 8, 2011

I'm neither a linguist nor a syntactician, but I'd say both the examples are ambiguous, and you either determine the correct interpretation from context, or ask for clarification. Then again, I parsed your second example as meaning John threw the cover to Alex, not the phone.

By which I mean John threw the cover, rather than the phone, to Alex
posted by russm at 12:22 AM on January 9, 2011

I don't think you're going to find any absolute "rules" because semantics will always be in the mix. "He blew the dust from the book and opened it to page 23": no English speaker would interpret "it" as the dust.

I bet that there are "tendencies" towards certain interpretations, and tendencies to avoid certain ambiguities, though, which become visible in cases less clearcut than the above. I'm sure that Language Log could whip up something illuminating about this if they were so inclined.

Re your second example: I'd go with "John pulled his phone out of its plastic cover and tossed it to Alex", maybe.
posted by No-sword at 12:37 AM on January 9, 2011

I think looking at this in terms of direct and indirect objects is adding unnecessary confusion to the simple problem that English makes it easy to create ambiguous sentences using pronouns.

For example, try using sentences similar to yours but where the second verb makes it clear which object is being referred to:

John picked the book up from the table and read it to Alex.
John brushed the dust from the book and read it to Alex.

In both cases "read" probably refers to the book, because you don't normally read a table or dust. Another example:

John finished talking to Alex and he picked up the phone.

This seems ambiguous because "he" could mean either John or Alex. But if we give it some context:

Harry wrote a list of numbers to call while he waited for the noisy conversation to finish. John finished talking to Alex and he picked up the phone.

It's Harry picking up the phone, right?

The examples you give, especially the "messenger" one, are confusing because the lack of context means that the reader has no way to resolve the ambiguity in the pronoun, although I agree with russm that in the plastic cover example it's not obvious that the item being tossed is the phone - I think there is a tendency for the main verb of a sentence to attach its meaning to the main topic of the sentence, and maybe John just bought a better cover and promised to give his old one to Alex.

Rather than relying on some strict grammatical rule, I'd say you'd be better off either giving some more context or rewriting the sentences. "John pulled the gun from the holster and took aim at Alex" works without a pronoun at all. "John pulled the plastic cover from the phone and tossed the phone to Alex" doesn't suffer too much from the repetition.
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 12:39 AM on January 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

I am by no means a linguist, but in your second example, it's completely ambiguous what John tossed to Alex. Could have been the phone, could have been the plastic cover. In such a sentence, you would have to re-direct, as it were, the object:

"John pulled the plastic cover off his phone and tossed the cover to Alex."
or
"John pulled the plastic cover off his phone and tossed the phone to Alex."

In the first example, it's obvious that John points the gun and not the holster at Alex because the holster shows up in a prepositional phrase, which gives more detail, kids, but NEVER contains the subject OR object of a sentence!
posted by deep thought sunstar at 12:43 AM on January 9, 2011

One more example: I made a final change to the comment and didn't preview it one last time before posting.

There must be something about this thread that makes books and dust an obvious example.
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 12:44 AM on January 9, 2011

This is a question for Language Log; specifically Geoffrey Pullum. FWIW, even in the second example I would assume that John had thrown the plastic cover at Alex, and not the phone.
posted by fantasticninety at 12:46 AM on January 9, 2011

Best answer: If you're asking for a rule which governs the understanding of these examples, well, you're out of luck. There isn't one. English allows for the creation of fundamentally ambiguous sentences. There's no way around that. Whatever people would guess or infer or assume from context can't get around that problem.

If you're looking for a rule about how to write sentences like this without ambiguity ... you just have to spot the ambiguity and resolve it.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 1:02 AM on January 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

There's really not many syntactic rules here (what non-linguists would call "grammatical" rules); what there are have to do with reflexivity. For instance,

John told Bill that he'd see him soon.

Syntax can't tell us for sure which "he" refers to John and which to Bill... but it does tell us that the two pronouns in "he'd see him" refer to two different people-- otherwise it'd be "he'd see himself".

Ambiguity can be reduced with gender too:

John told Sue that he'd see her soon.

But in general, we use context to disambiguate pronouns. And we're pretty good at it, as either speakers and listeners. E.g. in your first example, we know that guns can be pointed and holsters not so much, so there's little confusion. If you want a more unusual meaning you generally have to reword to make it clearer.

Or to answer the original question a little more clearly: unless there is a syntactic rule (such as the reflexivity or gender rules mentioned), we interpret the pronouns as best we can, according to what makes the most sense. If we can't, we ask what the speaker was trying to say!
posted by zompist at 1:06 AM on January 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

I think that you are all over-thinking this one. It is contextual. Take the sentence "The cat caught the bird in the tree. It died shortly afterwards." Cats, birds and trees can all die. The cat is the subject of the first sentence while tree is the nearest to the second sentence, therefore, syntactically, one might think the it could refer to either. However, because of our knowledge of cats, birds and trees, most English speakers would think the it referred to the bird, as that is the most likely outcome if there is no other information. So, in the OP's original sentence, we normally aim guns but not holsters therefore most English speakers would assume that John aimed the gun. If he did aim the holster, the sentence would have to say so, i.e. John pulled the gun out of the holster and aimed the holster at Alex.
posted by TheRaven at 1:20 AM on January 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

Yeah, but where was the bird when the cat caught it?
posted by iamkimiam at 3:08 AM on January 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

I am being somewhat serious in my comment/question there...showing that not all ambiguity is solely contextual. Sometimes, and in many of the cases above, the scope or governance of the clause (and its anaphora/referent(s)) is unknown (syntactic ambiguity) AND/OR the context can't disambiguate (semantic/discourse ambiguity).
posted by iamkimiam at 3:19 AM on January 9, 2011

Amphiboly.

To be avoided by taking care with construction and punctuation.
posted by Decani at 3:31 AM on January 9, 2011

I should add that while my link is dealing with amphiboly as a fallacy (since it is often found in that form) it's also recognised as a grammatical issue. Sometimes called "amphibology" too.

From Wiktionary: "Strictly speaking, in an amphiboly the individual words are unambiguous; the ambiguity results entirely from the linguistic manner in which they have been combined."
posted by Decani at 3:34 AM on January 9, 2011

Best answer: This is one of the reasons why machine translations from one language to another remain elusive despite the availability of enormous amounts of computation power. If you try to teach a computer program to parse a sentence like, "John pulled the gun out of the holster and aimed it at Alex," you would also have to teach it that guns are things that you generally aim and holsters are things that generally hold guns and aren't aimed. Without that knowledge, there is no way to know which one the "it" refers to; the meaning of the sentence depends on knowing much more about the world than just what is contained in the text. Teaching a computer to translate that would mean teaching it everything that a human person knows, not just rules of grammar and dictionaries. This is obviously quite intractable, to the point where people have given up entirely on the approach. Google's translate service for example doesn't know anything about grammar rules and doesn't even try to parse the sentence. There's is a purely statistical approach where you look at tons of documents and eventually form inferences about what a phrase or sentence in one language looks like in another.
posted by Rhomboid at 5:02 AM on January 9, 2011

(ugh, s/There's/Theirs/)
posted by Rhomboid at 5:04 AM on January 9, 2011

Response by poster: I think AmbroseChapel got best what I wanted to say. Of course I can clarify the sentence, and the context will almost always support the examples I have given, but I wanted to deliberately keep it as ambiguous as possible, and experiment with how 'proper' English grammar works with it.

Based on the responses, I guess the best we have is that raw context is what affects the meaning of a sentence like this, rather than techinicalities of grammar and syntax, i.e. common sense rules.
posted by Senza Volto at 5:06 AM on January 9, 2011

Here, 'it' is the objective pronoun, 'gun' is the direct object and 'the holster' is, to my understanding the indirect object, as is 'Alex'.

Neither of those is the indirect object of the sentence in question. Both are objects of adverbial prepositional phrases. Similarly for 'phone' and 'Alex' in your second example sentence. Neither of your example sentences has indirect objects. In the sentence "I tossed Alex the phone", 'Alex' is the indirect object.

'it' is the objective pronoun

I think you're confused here. The term "objective case" describes the declension of the word: how the form of the word changes according to usage. Pronouns in English are declined according to how they are used in the sentence, e.g. 'I' is the subjective first person pronoun while 'me' is the objective first person pronoun.

When you describe the grammar of the sentence, you use the term "object". Roughly speaking, an object is a noun that is not a subject of a sentence or clause. In describing sentence grammar, however, there is not an additional category for "objective pronoun". A pronoun can be an object of a sentence, or of a dependent verbal clause, or of a prepositional clause, etc. In this case, the word will be declined in the objective case. When discussing the grammar of the sentence, however, it is not "the objective pronoun"; it is merely an object, as any other noun would be an object.
posted by mr_roboto at 12:33 PM on January 9, 2011