Learn English – Can a clause have more than one (in)direct object

grammarobjectssubjects

I am fairly convinced that any English clause (and it probably also counts for other languages, but I can't be sure about that) can only contain 1 subject, 1 direct object, and 1 indirect object. This seems lower-grade common knowledge to me, but I don't know if this is an official rule and I can't really find any linguistic authoritative source that says so. Is this indeed true? And if not, what would be a counterexample?

Obviously, a sentence can have a compound subject/object such as in:

John and Mary are walking down the street.

But in that case, I would argue that there is 1 subject that is "John and Mary".

Best Answer

Our esteemed professor has in a potentially ephemeral comment above written this fine answer, which I herebelow consign to posterity and the general community pro bono publico:

Yes, it’s a base-level rule. These terms (Su, DO, IO) are called Grammatical Relations and form dependency trees with the predicate; this is a representational practice derived from logic.

Not all languages have syntax that uses these relations, though — there are many ergative structures in the world, and for them “Subject” and “Direct Object” are meaningless terms.

“Indirect Object”, on the other hand, is usually just the receiver.

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