tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jan 18 19:50:55 1999
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Re: Ordering food
ja'pu' peHruS:
>OTOH, by all I have learned about English grammar, your sentence IS a perfect
>example of an IO. "...for my father" is the IO.
jIja'pu':
>vaj jaS pab wIyaj. I've heard it labeled as an "adject", which is not
>the same thing as an "indirect object".
ja' peHruS:
>I have never heard of the word "adject"; and, it is not in the dictionary.
Depending on the dictionary, neither is "indirect object".
>Your confusion regarding "beneficiaries" can be cleared up by reading section
>6.8 of TKD's addendum explaining that indirect objects and beneficiaries are
>merely different terms for the same idea.
I'd drop this in a second if it were just about terminology, but I believe
you've badly misinterpreted what TKD says about indirect objects. In order
to clear up what I see as *your* confusion, I'm going to have to consider
some more English grammar.
If "for my father" in "I cooked dinner for my father" is an indirect
object, then so are "because of the weather" in "I slept because of the
weather" and "over the fence" in "I threw the ball over the fence." The
phrases serve the same basic grammatical function in the English sentence.
But I am absolutely certain that none of these phrases is an indirect
object -- because indirect objects are *nouns*, not prepositional phrases.
The only one of these phrases that fits the use of {-vaD} in Klingon is the
first one, because "my father" is the beneficiary of the action. The others
use different syntactic markers in Klingon, because the nouns in the phrases
are serving purposes other than beneficiary. If you're going to claim that
indirect objects and beneficiaries are the same thing, you're going to have
to define indirect objects better than saying "...for my father" is one.
-- ghunchu'wI'