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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 58
letter, a letter is the direct object, while Pat is the indirect object. (In some
older treatments, Pat would still be considered an indirect object in Kim wrote
a letter to Pat, but it is more often treated differently, reflecting the grammatical
structure rather than the meaning.) Finally, in Kim is the owner, the owner is
called the subject complement. The owner refers to the same person as the
subject does (namely, Kim), and while objects can become the subjects of
passive verbs (The video shop is run by Kim), subject complements cannot (*The
owner is been by Kim).
With those preliminaries out of the way, we can turn to form and function.
A potato can be used for a number of things. It can be cooked in various ways
and eaten, whether in boiled, mashed, baked, fried or chipped form. It can be
turned into potato flour; it can be used to hold cocktail sticks carrying lumps
of cheese or other delicacies; it can be used to make stamps for printing with;
it can be used to make pellets to fire from a potato gun. The same basic item,
the potato, has various functions.
In the same way, the phrase the mouse, while remaining a noun phrase, may
have any one of a number of jobs in a sentence. Consider the ways it used in
(1)–(5).
(1) The mouse ran away.
(2) I’ve caught the mouse.
(3) I gave the mouse a piece of cheese.
(4) They showed me a picture of the mouse.
(5) I trod on the mouse’s tail.
In (1) the mouse is the subject of the sentence, in (2) it is the direct object of
the verb, in (3) it is the indirect object, in (4) it is the object of a preposition,
part of the post-modifier for picture, and in (5) it is part of the determiner. The
form remains the same, but the functions in the sentence have changed. In this
particular case the difference between form and function is captured by the
terminology used. Phrase types are form labels, while subject, object, etc. are
function labels. So although our terminology does not specifically draw attention
to what is a form and what is a function, in this instance it provides us
with distinct terms for talking about the two aspects of the thing we are
describing.
Similarly, we can find a prepositional phrase such as in the garden used with
different functions, and again we have, or can find, terminologies which allow
us to make the distinctions.
(6) The chair in the garden is more comfortable than this one.
(7) After lunch we walked in the garden.
(8) The cat is in the garden.