Unit 5: subjects, objects and adverbials

subject and object

This Unit draws on the knowledge of verbs that you acquired in Unit 3.
If you cannot remember the difference between transitive, intransitive, ditransitive, monotransitive and ambivalent verbs, here's some revision.
Look at the verbs in the left-hand column, make a sentence or two in your head and then click on the to get some comments:

smoke	This verb can be transitive or intransitive so it is ambivalent. We can have, e.g.: She smoked a cigar (transitive) and She smokes (intransitive)
give	This verb is always transitive because we cannot say simply: She gave because it must have at least one object as in: She gave her time willingly* but it is also frequently ditransitive as in, e.g.: She gave me the money or She gave the money to me in which the money is the direct object and me is the indirect object.
come	This verb is intransitive. We cannot say: She came the party but we can say She came to the party
destroy	This verb is monotransitive only. We can say: He destroyed the old shed but we cannot say: He destroyed or He destroyed me the shed

Hopefully, by now, you found that quite easy.
If you couldn't do that, you should review the section in Unit 3.

There are 4 sections to this unit and here's the menu.
Clicking on the yellow arrow at the end of each section will return you to this menu.

Section	Looking at:
A	Subjects and objects Identifying which is which.
B	Passive and active voice clauses Raising the object to the subject position.
C	Multi-word verbs Transitive and intransitive
D	Adverbials Modifying and completing verb phrases.

Section A: Subject and Objects

A task

The subject of a verb is who or what does the action or exists in the state.
The object is the thing or person on which the verb acts or which receives or benefits from the action.
So, in, for example:

John broke the glass
John is the subject (who did the action) and the glass is the object (which received the action)
The weather improved
The weather is the subject and there is no object
Fred went to Margate
Fred is the subject and, again, there is no object (the verb is intransitive)
That man in the corner with the old dog bought everyone a drink
We have a more complicated sentence but we can still say:
1. That man in the corner with the old dog is the subject
2. a drink is the first, direct object (because that is what he bought)
3. everyone is the second, indirect object (because they were the people who got the benefit)

In this list, can you identify the subject and the objects? Click on to show the answer

1	She was carrying her books
2	Some of Mozart's earliest compositions are on the radio tonight
3	That he was allowed to leave early surprised me
4	I told her that the money was not enough
5	The University press published the book for him
6	In the corner is the best place for it

Here are some notes:

1	She was carrying her books	This is an easy one: she is the subject her books (not just books) is the object. The verb carry is always transitive so must have an object.
2	Some of Mozart's earliest compositions are on the radio tonight	This sentence has a long subject noun phrase but no object. The subject is: Some of Mozart's earliest compositions but there is no object because the verb (be) is a copular verb and they take complements, not objects.
3	That he was allowed to leave early surprised me	This sentence is unusual. The subject is not a noun or a pronoun, it is what is called a nominalised clause. The clause: That he was allowed to leave early has been made into a noun (that is what nominalised means). The object is me.
4	I told her that the money was not enough	This is another unusual sentence because the subject is clear (I) but the object is: that the money was not enough which is another nominalised clause acting as the object of the verb. We also have an indirect object (her) and the verb is also unusual because in this meaning (inform) it must take an indirect object.
5	The University press published the book for him	This is not easy. The subject is clear. It is: The University press and the direct object is, of course, the book. You would be forgiven for thinking that we also have an indirect object (him) but we cannot say: The University press published him the book so the phrase for him is actually an adverbial, not a real object.
6	In the corner is the best place for it	This contains an uncommon subject phrase which is a prepositional phrase that has been nominalised to act as a subject of the verb (in the corner). There is no object because, again, the verb is copular.

So, the moral is that subjects and object are usually simple (and not so simple) noun phrases but sometimes we can convert clauses and phrases into nouns and then use them as the subject or object of verbs.
That is what has happened in sentences 3., 4. and 6.

Case

So we have the terminology right, what we are talking about here with terms such as subject and object is to do with case:

the subject is the nominative case
the object is the accusative case
possession is signalled by the genitive case

Other languages are much more enthusiastic about case, making changes to articles, adjectives, nouns and all sorts of other elements to conform to the case in which they appear.
English is simpler (although the pronoun system is heavily influenced by case considerations) and we can happily just talk about the subject, object and possessive cases, however non-technical and loose it sounds.
In fact, there are those who aver that English doesn't really have a case grammar (or not much of one).

Ordering the elements

A very simple way to identify the subject and object of verbs in English, which may be how you solved the puzzles above, is to look at where they come in the sentence.
This is because English does not mark the subject and the object in any way (by, for example, changing an ending or altering the form of the determiner).
This means, therefore, that the difference between:
The traffic jam caused the delay
and
The delay caused the traffic jam
can only be understood by looking at the order of the elements.
In English, the most common way, by far, is to put the Subject first, then the Verb and then the Object (if any).
English, therefore, is described as an SVO language.

Other languages do thing differently.
In English, we know that the difference between:
    The man told the woman
and
    The woman told the man
is determined by which element goes where in the sentence. In the first, we know that the man did the telling and in the second that it was the woman.
In other languages, German, for example, which has a sophisticated case grammar, the first sentence is:
    Der Mann sagte der Frau
and the second sentence is
    Die Frau sagte dem Mann
and you can see that the form of the word for the is different (der, die and dem).
Those two sentences translate like this:

German	Der	Mann	sagte	der	Frau
English	The	man	told	the	woman
German	Die	Frau	sagte	dem	Mann
English	The	woman	told	the	man

And you can see in the yellow boxes how the article (the) changes depending on who did the telling and who was told. When the man is the subject, the article is der and when the woman is the subject, the article is die. However, when the man is the object, the article is dem and when the woman is the object, the article is der.

This means that:
Dem Mann sagte die Frau
still means
The woman told the man
even though the phrases have been reversed.
We can reverse the phrases in English, of course, but if we do, we change the meaning of the sentence.

In the essential guide to subjects and object on this site, linked below, you can access a list of languages some of which are SVO (like English) and some of which have a different ordering, often SOV (like Bengali, Farsi, Hindi, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean and Turkish), where the usual ordering is different so in those languages the sentence would be:
The woman the man told.

Learn more

If you want to discover more now about subjects and objects, go to:
essential guide to subjects and objects
which has links to other guides in the area of word ordering.

Take a test

To make sure you have understood so far, here's a little test.
Identify the subjects and the objects of the verbs in this story and then click on the story for the answers.

case structure 1

Notice that:

The subjects are in black and the objects are in red.
All verbs have subjects.
Not all verbs have objects. Some verbs do not (or don't always) take an object. For example, in John drove the car, we have a verb with a subject (John) and an object (the car) but in he came back, he is the subject of came and there is no object.
In the first sentence we have a bit in green. This is still the object of the verb because it's a nominalised clause. In some analyses, it is called the predicate.

Section B: Passive and Active voice

My camera's been stolen!

Now that we know the difference between the subject and the object, we can make things confusing!

As we saw above, most English positive sentences follow the SVO ordering so we get, for example, all the sentences in the left-hand column of this table:

Active	→	Passive
He spent the money		The money was spent (by him)
Mary did the work		The word was done (by Mary)
The car has damaged the fence		The fence has been damaged (by the car)
My team did the best work		The best work was done by my team, not the other teams

but now we need to consider what is happening in the right-hand column.
The sentences in the yellow column are all active sentences and that is the usual way positive sentences are formed as we have seen.
In the green column, we have the passive sentence equivalents and we choose this form because:

We don't know what the subject of the active sentence is as in:
My camera has been stolen
We don't care who the subject is as in:
The house has been sold
The subject is obvious to everyone as in:
She has been arrested
We want to make the subject even more important as in:
The window was broken by the neighbours' children, not our children

Overall, the simpler way of saying all this is that we use a passive sentence or clause when we want to mark something in the sentence as being particularly important. In these sentences that is:

my camera
the house
she
the neighbours' children

In the first three sentences, it is not necessary to insert the phrase with by so that is optional and why it was in brackets in the green column.

Forming a passive sentence

This is how we make a passive voice clause in English (languages differ):

Find the object and put it first
Insert the correct form of the verb be
Insert the correct form of the main verb (the past participle)
(Insert by + the original subject of the sentence)

If you want to see how that's done with a different example, watch this little video:

We can only form a passive sentence when there is an object (otherwise there is nothing to raise to the patient position in the sentence) but we can form two passive clauses from a ditransitive verb so from, e.g.:
    The head teacher gave all the children a prize
we can form both:
    A prize was given to all the children
and
    All the children were given a prize.

Even when there is an object, some verbs will not form passive sentences so there are no passive equivalents of, e.g.:
    The car lacks petrol
    They possess enough money
    She suffered a panic attack
    She has no time

Describing a passive sentence

There is a temptation to keep with the terms subject and object when describing passive clauses but that leads to a certain amount of confusion and looseness. We cannot really describe the book in:
The book was written by my sister
as the subject because we then have no way to describe my sister.
For this reason, we refer to the object of the active sentence as the patient and the subject as the agent, like this:

Patient phrase	Verb phrase	Agent phrase
The money	was lost	by the children
The car	will be repaired	by the workshop
Anyone who comes late	may be refused entry	by the manager

Please remember:
A passive sentence does not mean exactly the same as the active sentence. If that were the case, there would be no need for it at all.
We select the passive because we want to emphasise something the sentence, not just at random.

Learn more

If you want to discover more now about passive clauses, go to:
voice: the essentials
passive voice: the in-service guide

There is also a short lesson for learners on understanding the passive.

Take a test

To make sure you have understood so far, try a test of your knowledge of the passive.
Use the 'Back' button to return when you have done that.

Section C: Multi-word verbs

A confusing area

The guide to multi-word verbs on this site is the longest of all because this is a deeply confusing and confused area.
Most websites which try to analyse the area for learners (and, alas teachers) get it wrong so here we will try to be simple.
A multi-word verb consists of more than one word. It is, if you like, a self-contained verb phrase.
This means that in a sentence like:
She gets on well with her father
we do not have the verb get operating alone. What we have is the verb get on which has a different meaning from the verb get. The object of that verb is her father but in this example:
I got the money from my father
the object of the verb is the money and from my father just tells us where it came from. In this sentence, the verb phrase is just the word get and it is NOT get from.

The following are all examples, in red, of multi-word verbs:

They looked up the word in the dictionary
I abstained from voting
I came across some old photographs
She caught up with the rest of the runners
I give in
She complained about the service

Here, we have examples of three types of multi-word verbs:

Sentences 1, 3 and 5 contain phrasal verbs.
Phrasal verbs are formed from a verb and an adverb and both parts contribute to the new meaning of the verb.
For example, we can have:
    She looked at the newspaper
    She looked under the car
    We looked over the fence
and many more ways of looking but the meaning of the verb look is unchanged in all these cases so these are not phrasal or multi-word verbs.
However, if we say:
    She looked after the children
    She looked out for her mother
we are changing the meaning of look by combining it with the adverb particle (after and out).
Sentences 2 and 6 contain prepositional verbs. These are often (and some say more correctly) called verbs with dependent prepositions.
The meanings of the verbs are unchanged by the prepositions but we are very limited (sometimes to only one) in the choice of prepositions to follow the verb.
We do not always need the preposition with these verbs so we can also say:
    I abstained
and
    She complained
but sometimes the preposition is required so we cannot say, for example:
    *I longed
or
    *I deal
without saying what for and what with.
Sentence 4 contains a combination. We have the phrasal verb catch up with a dependent preposition, with so the combination is called a phrasal-prepositional verb.

Phrasal verbs in particular give learners significant problems because:

They do not exist in many languages and even when there is something similar, it often works differently.
Word ordering is a problem because we can have, for example:
    She looked the word up
    She looked up the word
and
    She looked it up
we cannot allow:
    *She looked up it
because that would be a verb (look) with a prepositional phrase telling us in what direction she looked. It might be rephrased as:
    She looked up the tree and saw the squirrel
and in that, of course, the verb does not mean consult a dictionary.
Most real phrasal verbs work this way but there are a number which cannot be separated like this and there is no simple rule to apply.
Too many teachers don't know how to analyse phrasal and other forms of multi-word verbs or even how to recognise them.

For much more detail, see the links below.

The problem comes when people are unable to do the analysis carefully enough so we find the following examples described as phrasal verbs:

He got on the bus
This is just the verb get meaning move to another place with a prepositional phrase on the bus. We can have also:
    He got over the wall
    He got in the car
    He got out of the room
and lots more but the meaning of get is unchanged.
It is not an example of a multi-word verb.
He turned down the road
This is another verb with a prepositional phrase, down the road and it is not a phrasal or prepositional verb because many more possibilities can be inserted such as at the traffic light, into the lane and so on.
It can be a phrasal verb when we have:
He turned down the work
because that means reject and is a case of the verb combining with the adverb to make a new meaning. In this case the verb is turn down not just turn and it is a phrasal verb.
She called back
This is not a phrasal verb although back is an adverb. It is just the verb modified by the adverb without any change of meaning.
We can also have:
    She called again
    She called frequently
    She called repeatedly
and so on.

The moral of the story is not to trust what you read on the web, especially concerning phrasal, prepositional and phrasal-prepositional verbs.
The links below will take you to some reliable guides.

Learn more

This link takes you to the in-service guide to the area:
the in-service guide to multi-word verbs
and this one takes you to the simpler guide:
the essential guide to multi-word verbs

Take a test

To make sure you have understood so far, try a test to see if you can recognise the three sorts of multi-word verbs and recognise verbs which are just verbs followed by a prepositional phrase or an adverb.
Use the 'Back' button to return when you have done that.

Section D: Adverbials

Distinctions first

Unit 3 explained how to recognise and use adverbs and adverbs are a kind of adverbial.
Unit 4 explained how prepositions combine with noun phrases to make prepositional phrases and prepositional phrases are also often adverbials.
That said, all adverbials are not adverbs.
Confused? Examples will help.

Adverbials are any words or phrases which tell us more about the verb. For example:
    John walked
is a perfectly comprehensible sentence standing alone. However,
    John walked quickly to work this morning in the rain because his wife had the car
tells us much more about the verb walk including:
    where John walked (to work, in the rain)
    how he walked (quickly)
    when he walked (this morning)
    why he walked (because his wife had the car).
All the words and phrases in brackets above are adverbials of some kind. They come in this order:

spatial
to work
telling us where or in what direction.
in the rain
telling us the surrounding circumstance.
Both of these, you now know, are prepositional phrase adverbials.
manner
quickly
telling us how.
You have probably recognised this as an adverb.
temporal
this morning
telling us when.
This is a noun phrase with a determiner, as you know.
causal
because his wife had the car
telling us the reason.
This is a complete clause linked with a conjunction telling us the reason for something.

Here are some more examples of concepts expressed using adverbials which are not adverbs:

She contradicts me from time to time
Mary went into the room without rushing
They enjoyed the party a lot
He looked to the sky
He is coming in a moment
They arrived after time

We can, naturally, express all those ideas with simple adverbs, like this:

She contradicts me sometimes
Mary went into the room slowly
They enjoyed the party greatly
He looked upwards
He is coming soon
They arrived late

3 cases of non-adverb adverbials

Apart from adverbs, English has three main ways of modifying (i.e., adding information to) a verb.

	Prepositional phrases
Go over the bridge

Prepositional phrases are the most common type of non-adverb adverbial. They are, in fact, even more common as a way of adding information to a verb than adverbs themselves.
They are formed by the preposition (over, under, round, through, by, before, after, to, from etc.) and its complement (or object) which is usually a noun phrase. Like this:

Preposition	Noun-phrase complement / object	Example	Function
before	lunch	They went for a walk before lunch	a time adverbial adding information to went for a walk
to	my house	She came to my house	a place adverbial adding information to the verb came
round	the shopping centre	They walked round the shopping centre	a place adverbial adding information to walked
in	in French	She spoke to me in French	a manner adverbial adding information to the verb spoke

Often, in almost all languages, sentences will contain a combination of prepositional phrases which each supply different sorts of extra information about the verb so we can have, for example:
    He walked over the hill to my house in the morning
which contains three prepositional phrases:
    over the hill (a prepositional phrase adverbial of place, specifically direction)
    to my house (ditto)
    in the morning (a prepositional phrase of time)

It is important that you know that the prepositional phrases in, for example:
    She went to the house on the corner
are not both adverbials because
   to the house
tells us where she went and is an adverbial but
    on the corner
does not tell us where she went, it tells us where the house is so it is modifying the noun, not the verb.

Prepositional phrase adverbials normally tell us when or where (i.e., they are time or place adverbials). That is not always the case because they can tell us other things. For example:
She muttered under her breath
tell us how she spoke, not where or when.

	Noun phrases
He lives next door

Noun phrases as adverbials are not very common but there are times when we do not need a preposition and the noun phrase can stand alone to tell us more about the verb. Here are three examples:
    He arrived yesterday evening (a noun-phrase time adverbial)
    He speaks a great deal (a noun-phrase adverbial of extent)
    They went home (a noun-phrase adverbial of place)

Be careful here not to confuse noun phrases acting as the object of the verb with noun phrases acting as adverbials or modifying another noun. For example, in:
She bought the house next door
the phrase next door is not an adverbial, it is modifying the house, not the verb, and the house is a noun phrase but not an adverbial because it is the direct object of the verb.

	Clauses
Spending time where she likes

A clause, by some definitions, is a group of words which contains at least one verb.

Clauses can act as adverbials in many ways: how, where, when and why. For example:
    They are doing it the way I told them to
tells us how they are doing it
    I am living where I want to be
tells us where I am living
    She went to the cinema after she left work
tells us when she went
    He asked because he needed the money
tells us why he asked

Learn more

If you want to discover more now about adverbials, go to:
adverbials: the essentials
That guide will tell you very little more than we have covered her. Most of this section is repeated from it.
If you want to know a lot more, try:
adverbials: the in-service guide

Take a test

To make sure you have understood so far, try a test of your knowledge of adverbials.
Use the 'Back' button to return when you have done that.