Introducing English Linguistics

me some photographs of herself and John in the Lake
District 
(ICE-GB S1A-009 112)
DVLA will then send 
you a new Registration Document in your name.
(ICE-GB W2D-010 026)
She poured 
me a second cup of coffee. 
(BNC HR7 458)
And when they banned me from playing cricket for a month, they actu-
ally did 
me a favour. 
(BNC CH8 1953)
All of the indirect objects in the above examples can be made subjects of
sentences in the passive voice, as in, for instance:
I was shown some photographs
You will be sent a new Registration Document
English syntax
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One additional test for an indirect object is that it can often be moved
after the direct object and become an object of the prepositions to or for:
She was showing some photographs to me.
They actually did a favour for me.
If the direct object is a personal pronoun, an indirect object is not possi-
ble. Instead, the potential indirect object must be moved to the object
position in prepositional phrases headed by to or for:
I’m just showing it to him 
(ICE-GB S1A-047 243)
*I’m just showing him it.
While these sentences are roughly equivalent in meaning to those in
which the indirect object precedes the direct object, the prepositional
phrases above are not indirect objects because objects can only have the
form of noun phrases. As will be demonstrated in the next section, the
prepositional phrases are best analyzed as adverbials.
Complements are constructions related to either the subject of the
sentence or the object. Subject complements follow a specific type of
verb: either copular be or a linking verb such as appear, seem, resemble,
or look. In this type of construction, the complement either names or
describes the subject. In the example below, the subject complement
ill, an adjective phrase, is linked by the copular verb is to the subject of
the sentence, my husband, and describes this person’s state of health:
What’s more, my husband is
ill, and I can’t afford to buy his medicine.
(BNC G3U 131)
In the next example, the copular verb was links the subject complement
my very first contact ... with the subject Radford. In this instance, the subject
complement serves to identify Radford as the speaker’s “first contact ...
with Chomsky’s theories”:
Yeah, Radford was