What is the syntactic status of [“Don’t wibble the fleems”]?
My suspicion is that it’s a noun – dialogue quotations function as the direct objects of verbs like “said,” and can be used in many other places where a noun is indicated (A hearty “fuck you” was all I got out of him when I asked for a dollar.) But I’m not completely confident of that assertion; the situation seems slightly complicated by constructions where a single quotation is split and the attributive verb interposed:
“Don’t wibble the fleems,” said Ampelios, “or else the ship will explode.”
Can I still say in this case that Ampelios’s complete quotation (“Don’t wibble the fleems or else the ship will explode”) is the direct object of “said”? Or is there some other grammatical category I should apply here?
Any ideas? I’ve tried googling just about everything relevant I can think of, but with no luck. Surely there’s some kind of formal grammatical take on this?
It’s the direct object of “Amphelios said”. The order of the words doesn’t change their syntactic classification.
WARNING: I don’t know what the heck half these things would be called in English, so translating from Spanish and hoping I am clear enough that English-language people can re-translate.
The direct object will in English often be a nominative syntagm, that is, an element whose main word is a noun, but this is often, not always. For example, in
give your father a hug
or
give Bessie my regards
the underlined parts are the direct objects.
A quoted sentence is a subordinate sentence. In the example in the OP, the quoted sentence is acting in a function which would often be adscribed to a nominative syntagm, but that does not make it one or make it “act as a noun”. Note that of the two nouns in my example, one needs an article in order to be a correct direct object; “father” by itself does not work as a direct object (“Father” would, but because it specifies an individual in a way that “father” doesn’t). A nominative syntagm may consist of only a noun, but it is not the same as a noun.
WARNING: I didn’t receive formal grammar training in English, so translating from Spanish and hoping I am clear enough that English-language people can re-translate.
In English, the direct object will usually be a nominative syntagm, that is, an element whose main word is a noun, or a prepositional syntagm, whose main element is a preposition and which contains a nominative syntagm in turn. For example, in
give your father a hug
or
give my regards to Bessie
the underlined parts are the direct objects.
A quoted sentence is a subordinate sentence. In the example in the OP, the quoted sentence is acting in a function which would often be adscribed to a nominative syntagm, but that does not make it one or make it “act as a noun”. Note that of the two nouns in my example, one needs an article in order to be a correct direct object; “father” by itself does not work as a direct object (“Father” would, but because it specifies an individual in a way that “father” doesn’t); the other one needs a preposition because of the positioning (“give Bessie my regards”, no preposition). A nominative syntagm may consist of only a noun, but it is not the same as a noun.
(Reposted for clarification and asked to delete the previous post)
Thanks, Nava! (Though I think BigT is right – the indirect object is the one that specifies “to whom.”)
So, if a quote isn’t itself a nominative, what lexical or syntactic category does it fit into? I’m not sure that “subordinate sentence” covers everything – since there’s no requirement that the contents of the quote be parsable in English (or in any language, for that matter: “En vérité,” said Father Langley, beginning to foam at the mouth, “fwwzvvvghrrbl.”).