Last week, the focus was on Verb-Subject-Agreement, with an announcement of this week’s focal point: Direct Objects and Prepositional Objects. As before, the intent here is to briefly review these grammatical elements of language.
Direct Objects
The first point to note in this context is the fact that not every sentence appears with a direct object in it. What to be aware of, however, when one does . . . Not much. Identify the subject and the verb of a sentence; if the subject performs an action on an object (a person or a thing), then you have found the direct object:
- My family takes a trip to the same seaside town every summer.
- My family = Subject; to take = Verb (in its base form in the sample sentence)
On which word does “family” perform the action of ‘taking’? Your answer here takes you to the Direct Object = “a trip”
PLEASE NOTE: The key concept here is that a verb MUST perform an action in order for a sentence to have a Direct Object. If a verb only indicates a “link”, then there cannot be a Direct Object in that sentence, for example, as in, “My family was always pleased with the accommodations.”
Prepositional Objects
The sample sentence immediately above, the one with a ‘linking’ verb, has no direct object (because it does not indicate an action). It has, however, a prepositional object:
- My family was always pleased with the accommodations.
The noun “accommodations” is the object of the preposition “with”; hence, the full underlined phrase makes up the prepositional object of the sentence.
The first sample sentence, too, has a prepositional object:
- My family takes a trip to the same seaside town every summer.
The noun “town” is the object of the preposition “to”; hence, “to town” makes up the prepositional object of the sentence. The words “same” (an adverb) and “seaside” (an adjective), different grammatical elements, function here as modifiers of the prepositional object.
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