directobjectlike

Directobjectlike is a label used in linguistics to describe arguments that fill an object-like role in a clause but do not always behave as canonical direct objects across languages or theoretical frameworks. The term is commonly employed in cross-linguistic typology, corpus annotation, and discussions of transitivity and valence.

Such elements typically carry a patient or theme semantic role, participate in transitive relations with a verb, and can bear related morphological markings, yet they may surface in nonstandard positions, be encoded by oblique case marking, clitics, or prepositions, or resist standard object extraction or passivization in some grammars. Researchers identify directobjectlike elements by distributional tests: their ability to appear in the object slot of the main clause, their response to passivization in languages where possible, their extraction properties, and their compatibility with other objects in ditransitives.

Cross-linguistically, languages may exhibit directobjectlike arguments in constructions such as resultatives, predicative complements, or certain complex predicates; in such cases, the argument retains object-like semantics though its surface encoding diverges from a canonical direct object. The label is thus often applied to describe noncanonical object behavior within a given analysis.

Directobjectlike is not a universally standardized term and overlaps with concepts such as oblique objects, object complements, or predicate arguments. It is mainly used as a descriptive label within specific annotation schemes or theoretical frameworks to capture noncanonical object-like behavior without committing to a single cross-cutting definition.