In the first, "Professor Miller" is modifying "Charles" and is not being acted upon - it's an adjective, and a complement to the direct object, Charles, who is being called Professor Miller.
In the second, "the rabbit" is the direct object - it's being acted upon, that is to say, it's being given. Given to whom? Why to Charles, the indirect object of the sentence.
First some terminology, so that we can agree what we are talking about. I will distinguish semantic/thematic roles from grammatical functions:
Semantic roles
- Agent=doer of the action
- Theme=directly affected/acted upon by the action
- Goal=end state/location of the Theme
Grammatical functions
- Subject=noun phrase which agrees with the verb/receives nominative case (I/he/they, etc.)
- Direct Object = noun phrase adjacent to the verb which gets a semantic role from that verb; receives accusative case (me/him/them, etc.)
- Indirect Object = noun phrase introduced by the preposition to.
A large part of the confusion in describing verbs like give in English comes from not distinguishing Goal from Indirect Object, and not distinguishing Direct Object from Theme.
Verbs like give in English have two alternate forms:
- John gave a book to me.
- John gave me a book.
Now lets apply the definitions above to these two sentences.
In both (1) and (2), John is the Agent (doer of the action), and also the Subject (agrees with the verb/would be he as a pronoun).
In (1) a book is the Theme (directly affected by the action) and also the Direct Object (adjacent to the verb and getting a semantic role from it. Me is the Goal (end state/location of the Theme) and also the Indirect Object (introduced by the preposition to).
In (2), however, things change. English has a rule commonly called "Dative Shift" which turns an Indirect Object (introduced by to) into a Direct Object (adjacent to the verb). This doesn't affect the semantic roles of the verb, but it does affect the grammatical functions. So in (2) although me is still the Goal (end state/location of the Theme) it is now the Direct Object (adjacent to the verb). A book is still the Theme (directly affected by the action) but is no longer the Direct Object. We can call it a second object if you like.
Now we can look at the Passive rule in English. Very roughly (because strictly speaking this is not quite correct), the passive in English makes the Direct Object of the active sentence the Subject of the passive sentence, and makes the subject of the active sentence an optional argument introduced by the preposition by. Since there are two active forms in (1) and (2) there should be two corresponding passive forms, and in fact, there are:
- A book was given to me (by John).
- I was given a book (by John).
In (3) the Direct Object of (1) became the subject, and in (4) the Direct Object of (2) became the subject. Since Passive doesn't care about the semantic roles, only the grammatical functions, we retain the same semantic roles as before: a book is the Theme in both sentences, and me/I is the Goal. Crucially, a book in (4) is not the direct object, but still the "second object" it was in the active form.
Now remember in (2) I said that a book is no longer the direct object of give because the Dative Shift rule makes the Indirect Object into a Direct Object. This predicts that the second object in (2) should not be able to undergo passive, because it it no longer a direct object, and this is in fact the case, as we can see in (5):
- *A book was given me.
This contrasts minimally with (3) which contains the preposition to. In that sentence, a book was the direct object in the active form, and therefore is able to be the target of the passive rule.
Best Answer
I've made some basic observations above, but here are some others...
Have I correctly identified 14 different sentence patterns? Or is the passive voice a separate entity not to be included? In which case there are 8 sentence patterns.
Well, your original sentences can be made into questions...I gave a book to Peter? To Peter I gave a book? etc.
Also, there are two form of the passive: static and dynamic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_voice#Dynamic_and_static_passive), so each of your passive sentences can be modified by inserting the word 'being' before given. The difference in sense is one of greater 'activity', a sense of something being pictured as happening or in progress.
Which sentence or sequence of words are incorrect and why?
3, 6, 11, 14 seem wrong. I cannot imagine a native English speaker using #3 except by mistake, or perhaps in poetry in order to meet the metrical demands of the line. With the verb 'give' you can only do #1. #3 is the sort of thing I can picture myself hearing foreign language learners saying. You cannot invert the direct object and indirect object after the subject without dropping 'to.' This is the same with the verbs offer or send. Some verbs, like report, can't even do the inversion in the first place.
Do these patterns have names? And please share any interesting or curious grammar facts which I may have overlooked in my question.
The examples in 1 through 9 that do not begin with the subject (i.e., I) are called 'inversions.' Inversion is a technique for changing the focus of the sentence. Focus, as a grammatical phenomenon, was largely ignored by traditional linguistics, but has become of great interest to today's linguists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_(linguistics))
Besides changing the focus of the sentence, these inversions also serve poetic purposes. In florid and formal writing, they provide variety, and they provide an additional way to meet the demands of the meter.
Note that sometimes inversion is grammatically required. For example, the place of "Had" cannot be changed in "Had I given Peter the book, he would have known what to do." -- unless the whole sentence is restructured: "If I had given Peter the book, he would have know what to do."
Finally, the remaining examples in the passive have their own 'feeling' to them. Although the passive is much more common in English than in many other languages, the effect of using the passive is to diminish attention to the agent (the person/thing doing the action) in favor of the person/thing being acted upon (the patient, in Latin). Much has been said about this. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_passive_voice#Style_advice)