Jemandemetwas

Jemandemetwas is a pedagogical label used in linguistics and language teaching to refer to the German ditransitive construction that combines a recipient in the dative with a theme in the accusative, typically expressed as jemendem etwas. The term is not an official grammatical item in standard German but a shorthand used to discuss the pattern of two objects in a single clause.

Etymology and form: The phrase combines the two parts of the canonical ditransitive pair—jemandem (to someone) and etwas (something)—into a single descriptor. In actual German orthography, the two elements are normally written separately as jemendem und etwas or, more commonly, as jemendem etwas. The label jemande metwas is therefore a schematic illustration rather than a dictionary entry.

Syntactic role and examples: Ditransitives commonly occur with verbs of giving, granting, showing, or sending, such as geben, schenken, zeigen, schicken. The typical word order places the dative recipient before the accusative object: Ich schenke dem Freund ein Buch. In pedagogical discussions, this sentence can be referred to as an instance of jemandemetwas to highlight the two-object structure without specifying the exact words.

Semantics and usage: The construction encodes two semantic roles: recipient (dative) and theme or object (accusative). Not all verbs allow a ditransitive pattern, and in many contexts pronouns replace full noun phrases (Ich schenke ihm ein Buch). The term jemandemetwas serves primarily as a teaching aid or analytic label rather than a separate grammatical category in everyday German.

See also: German ditransitives, dative case, accusative case, indirect object.