Bill,

I don't know if your examples are the same.  That this, in 1. you can move
"story": Brunhild told a story to Ivar.

But can you do that with the other two examples?

Christine in Baltimore

-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Spruiell, William C
Sent: Friday, February 13, 2004 1:55 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Inverted indirect object?

Diane -

I wouldn't even read it as inverted. The basic sentence format seems to be
"X told Y Z," with Z being an infinitive in this case (but not necessarily
in others); e.g.:

Brunnhild told Ivar a story.

Brunnhild told Ivar to load the catapult.

Brunnhild told Ivar, "Load the catapult."

Granted, 'told' with an NP object doesn't seem to mean the same thing as
'told' with an infinitival object, and if we wanted to multiply sentence
types we could view them differently, but for pedagogic purposes a "coarse"
analysis is probably better. If I'm right on that, 'everyone' in your
sentence is a regular indirect object, like 'Ivar' in my examples above, and
'Who' is standing in for the subject as an interrogative, not a relative,
pronoun. The relative pronoun would be in something like this:

That's the guy who told everyone to get along with one another.

I'm sure there are other takes on this one, but that's one that will work
fairly simply.

Bill Spruiell

Dept. of English
Central Michigan University


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