grammar - Can a sentence have an indirect object without a direct object?


Everywhere I look online, people seem to say the same thing: "A sentence with an indirect object must have a direct object." Every case of confusion I've seen about this rule has only involved examples where direct objects are omitted but still implied.


However, consider the following sentence:



Jim ran to the store.



As I understand it, here ran is intransitive and therefore has no direct object; and to the store is a prepositional phrase, making store the indirect object of ran. Therefore this sentence contains an indirect object and no direct object.


Is this observation correct? If so, why do so many people insist that sentences cannot have indirect objects without direct objects?



Answer



Most of these answers only briefly or vaguely touch on the core of the correct answer: intransitive verbs simply have no object at all. You would only call some word an indirect object if it fits into a grammatical structure that has a component defined as an indirect object. A prepositional phrase contains a transitive verb's indirect object, but for intransitive verbs such a phrase is simply a modifier on the verb.


In other words, it doesn't make sense to talk about objects in the context of intransitive verbs, any more than it would make sense to talk about gas mileage in the context of bicycling. Both cars and bikes can carry gasoline, sure, but only a car carries it to fuel propulsion (and therefore can be discussed in terms of fuel efficiency), while the fact that a byciclist might be carrying it is merely coincidence and has nothing to do with their vehicle's power source.


This explains why so many sources I've found online assert you can't have an indirect object without an object: it's simply the nature of contexts in which indirect objects have a place. Every grammatical structure with an indirect object component also has a direct object component. The notion of an indirect object doesn't exist in isolation outside of these structures.


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