Understanding and Teaching the Indirect Object in Spanish

Understanding and Teaching the Indirect Object in Spanish presents an easy-to-understand approach to all aspects of direct and indirect objects in Spanish. Distinguishing between direct and indirect objects can pose challenges for learners and is almost impossible to do using the tools that linguists have traditionally used. This book offers two simple, all-encompassing inferences that allow learners to tackle this area of language by intuitively inferring the distinction, as native speakers do, between verber and verbed. This book will be of interest to teachers and learners of Spanish and other second languages, as well as linguists interested in argument structure, second language acquisition, second language teaching or pedagogy, and multilingualism.

Luis H. González is Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at Wake Forest University, USA. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Davis. His main areas of research are semantic roles, case, reflexivization, clitic doubling, differential object marking, dichotomies in languages, Spanish linguistics, and second language learning. He has written and co-authored six successful titles on these topics.

Chapter 1: Subject and direct object or verber and verbed? Chapter 2: Distinguishing some direct objects from an indirect object can be a puzzle; distinguishing a verbed from a verbee is an inference that always works Chapter 3: Against the need for 11 or more types of dative sentences in Spanish and in other languages Chapter 4: A pronoun does not double its indirect object; the latter drops when it is known information in postverbal position