direct objects

In sentences with action verbs, the grammatical subjects are the do-ers of the actions; the objects are the receivers of these actions. From the Oxford dictionary:

direct object: a noun, noun phrase, or pronoun that refers to a person or thing that is directly affected by the action of a verb

Direct objects are the very common; they are the targets of the action verbs so the direct object is the noun, noun phrase, or pronoun that answers the question

For example, in ‘John eats cake’, the answer to “who/what does <John> <eats>?” is ‘cake’ so ‘cake’ is the direct object.

The only parts of a sentence that are truly necessary are the subject and the verb, so many sentences don’t have a direct object, even if they have an action verb; for example, ‘John sings’, Sue cries’, and ‘Mary runs’ are all complete sentences with action verbs but none of them has a direct object. Sometimes we can add a direct object to such sentences, e.g., ‘John sings a folk song’, ‘Sue cries tears of joy’, and ‘Mary runs a half-marathon’.

In English, the direct object is usually located after the verb; in Japanese, we follow the direct object with the particle marker ‘wo’. In the same way that, in Japanese, the subject and its marker ‘ga’ form the conceptual unit or subject phrase ‘[subject ga]’, the direct object and its marker ‘wo’ form the conceptual unit or object phrase ‘[direct-object wo]’, i.e., since they are phrases, we cannot separate their contents.

One of the ways in which Japanese depends on context deals with the status relationship beween the two speakers. One of the most common relationships is that between a person of high status and a person with low status; this can be a boss and an employee, or a teacher and a student. In this case the person with low status has to use a type of speech that is respectful. In textbooks, this respectful speech might be called polite, formal, or polished. Another common relationships is that between person of the same status; this can be two members of the family, or two childhood friends. In this case, both persons use a type of speech that is familiar. In textbooks, this familiar speech might be called informal, casual or plain. The type of speech that we use changes the way in which we use the direct-object marker.

In formal speech, we usually use ‘wo’ explicilty:

Hence, for example, the actual translation of ‘It is I who buys a book’ is the implicit version ‘本を かいます’, which under the hood explicitly means ‘わたしが 本を かいます’.

As shown above, in formal speech we might use a ∅ subject when we can infer the explicit subject from context or by default; usually we use the direct object marker ‘wo’ explicitly, though. However, in casual speech we tend to replace ‘wo’ with a ∅ particle, i.e., an implicit particle that we can infer from context.

Since the direct object is a noun or a pronoun, same as for the subject, we might we wondering if direct objects represented with a pronoun in English tend to be represented with the zero pronoun in Japanese. And, indeed, we would be correct, both in formal speech:

and in casual speech:

As before, an implicit (∅ を) doesn’t make sense out of context, any more that a ‘I buy it’ does, i.e., we need to know from context what ‘it’ is. For example, the sequence ‘I see a car. I buy it.’ makes sense because the context says that the direct object pronoun ‘it’ that we are buying in the second sentence is replacing the direct object noun ‘the car’ that we mention in the first sentence; exactly the same happens with 「車を　見る。かいまう。」 .

Summary

The extensive use in Japanese of implicit zero particles and zero pronouns extends to direct object particles and pronouns.

∅ = You

Indirect objects

and

indirect object: a noun, noun phrase or pronoun in a sentence, used after some verbs, that refers to the person or thing that an action is done to or for

Hence, and the indirect object answers the question “where does <direct oject> goes?”