indirect interrogative clause [Lat. interrogare ‘to ask’]

Syntactic function which can be expressed morphologically, positionally, and/or structurally, depending on the language type. The most common way to express the indirect object morphologically is through the dative case, although accusative and genitive complements (e.g. when they are treated as second objects) are sometimes treated as indirect objects. In some languages (e.g. English, the Romance languages) the function of the dative is taken over by a preposition (e.g. Fr. à, Span., Ital. a, Eng. to, e.g. I gave it to him). In contrast to a direct object, the indirect object in many languages (e.g. German, French) cannot occur as the subject in passive constructions: Philip hilft ihm ‘Philip is helping him’ vs *Er wurde geholfen ‘He was helped’. In languages where indirect objects are not marked by case or adposition, there are different opinions as to the structural position of indirect objects. Thus, for the sentence John gave Mary the book, one finds analyses where both Mary and the book are considered to be indirect objects (see Ziv and Sheintuch 1979).