Hi, I’m not sure if this is the right forum, but… Can you think of player commands where two objects come directly after each other without a preposition or anything in between?
One example would be a player typing “Give Jane the diamond” instead of “Give the diamond to Jane”.
But are there any other examples? This is why I was collecting walkthroughs the other day, and I didn’t really find anything. Obviously I didn’t search every walkthrough out there.
Ditransitive verbs are comparatively rare. But there are a few others:
Show Jane the diamond.
Throw Jane the diamond.
There’s also the borderlinish case of “push table north.”
“give me liberty”
“give me death”
The Inform library has “give/pay/offer/feed X Y”, “show/display/present X Y”, and “push X D” (where D is a direction).
(I guess “display X Y” and “present X Y” are beyond the expected bounds of grammar, but the Inform library accepts them anyway.)
Ok, thanks, and extra points to Dannii for ditransitive verbs. I found a list of some more here: cse.unsw.edu.au/~billw/ditransitive.html
I guess “push box north” is actually another kind of phrase - the direction here is… an adverb?
Linguistically it is an adverb, but it’s perfectly legitimate for IF engines to consider it a second noun.
Infocom’s Bureaucracy has a bug where using SEND this way crashes the program.
Englishly speaking, yes; in this context it’s a shortening of “northwards”.
Inform generally considers “north” to be a noun synonymous with “the north wall/boundary of the current location”. For example, “EXAMINE NORTH” will tell you there’s nothing unusual about the north wall. (Well, actually I see Inform7 gives the more appropriately generic message “You see nothing unexpected in that direction.”)
In David Long’s “Adventure 6” (a Colossal Cave extension), the only two such verbs are THROW and FEED. (“THROW TROLL SPICES”; “FEED SNAKE BIRD”.)
In general, pretty much any command is expressible as “VERB OBJ SUBJ” if and only if it’s expressible as “VERB SUBJ TO OBJ”, in which case OBJ will generally be animate. This includes “throw”, “feed”, “give”, “show”, “tell”, “pass”, “send”, and “mail”. The only counterexamples I can think of (all with inanimate OBJs) are “add”, “apply”, and “turn” (“ADD POT CARROTS”; “APPLY FEET OINTMENT”; and “TURN STONE GNOME”, which is sort-of cheating).
You can say “Turn gnome stone,” which is almost certainly cheating as “stone” is an adjective there. (I think I’d say “Turn gnome wooden,” at least.)
Hmm, that does make me think of verbs of becoming which can take two nouns:
DUB SQUIRE KNIGHT
MAKE THIS BOY A MAN
You can also have indirect objects expressible with “for” instead of “to” like “peel me a grape” and “call her a cab.”