Is it possible for a sentence in human language to have a subject and three objects without having more than one clause?

GrammarSocialist · 5 months

Some people call "trade" a tri-transitive verb, as in "Alice traded Bob a pen for his pencil." Not sure if that covers what you're thinking of.

DNiemi · 5 months

Yes, many Bantu languages do it. Kinyarwanda is famous for this, for example [umugore araheera umugabo imbwa ibiryo] "The woman is giving food to the dog for the man", where "man" is syntactically an object.

limetom · 5 months

In a very similar way to many Bantu languages, as DNiemi pointed out, Ainu can have a polytransitive verb.

A made up example:

Ku-matak kamuy cise k-o-e-ko-isoytak.
1SG.POSS-younger_sister bear house 1SG.SUBJ-in.APL-about.APL-to.APL-tell_a_story.
"I told my younger sister a story about bears in the house." (The English here is ambiguous but the Ainu is not: the storytelling is taking place in the house; the bears are not.)

These constructions, however, are exceedingly rare; you almost never find more than two applicatives on a verb.

EDIT On further reflection based off of my corpus data, this is probably impossible. However, we can't really know unless we go ask the last native speakers, if there are any.

stroopsaidwhat · 5 months

Ea cenam puella filiae dare potest. She can give the dinner from the girl to the daughter. My Latin is rusty but does that even count in English for what you are asking?

Choosing_is_a_sin · 5 months

In Foundations of Language, Ray Jackendoff gives the example of the verbs wager or bet, that has four arguments. Here's a sentence with it:

John bet Tim $25 that he couldn't swallow a sword.

It's hard for me to come up with a scenario in which we could substitute a noun for that final clause, so my guess is no. Just a guess.

hurrayforzac · 5 months

yeah, it sounds like really any language with at least four distinct cases (the main ones plus maybe dative, ablative, and/or locative) should be able to have as many arguments. i don't know any of those that well, but those Bantu languages, Latin, and probably Finnish and Basque should meet the criteria. we can't do it so easily in english because we've lost a lot of our case system, but you can think of a situation like:

The subject gave this direct object with a comitative object to this dative object on behalf of a benefactive object near some locative object with an instrumental object ...and on and on and on.

demaney · 5 months

Why wouldn't "Jake gave Sally, Moses, and Jebediah their gifts" count?

kaddok · 5 months

In Galician, is pretty frequent to have a "solidarity pronoun", used to involve the speaker with the action, and also, an "interest dative" indicating the beneficiary or sufferer of the actions.

So if you combine all that with the appropiate verb, you could get a sentence with references to up to five objects, four if you get nitpicky.

"A miña nai non che vos deu a carta ao meu pai"

(My mom didn't give the letter to my dad [for you] [solidarity])

where

A miña nai (my mom) -> subject

a carta (the letter) -> direct object

o meu pai (my dad) -> indirect object

che (literally, sg. you) -> [solidarity pronoun]

vos (pl. you) -> interest dative

evieplural · 5 months

The only situations I can think of involve objects of the preposition. But then again, I only know 4 languages and no where near as many as all of human language :).

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