Is "door" the direct object of "The cat ran out the door"?

My friend and I got into a heated discussion about direct objects. While we both understand what they are and how they work, we got stuck on a random sentence that I blurted out. Now, if I say:

• "Mary baked a cake."

then obviously "cake" is the direct object.

If I were to say:

• "The cat ran out the door."

then it gets a bit more confusing.

She argues that "door" would be the direct object. I argued that "door" can't be correct since the door did not run, nor did anyone do the running to it. Also, you can not put it into the passive and still retain the meaning:

• "The door was run (out) by the cat."

versus,

• "A cake was baked by Mary."

The various answers here and elsewhere on similar questions on the site mainly mention the two points that I mentioned above: firstly, no-one did any running to the door, and secondly there does not seem to be a passive version of the sentence. However, what I need here is a concrete argument to persuade my friend (or for me to be persuaded with). After all, in the sentence "I have a rabbit", I believe rabbit is a direct object. However, no-one is doing any having to the rabbit. And there does not seem to be a good passive version of this sentence either: "A rabbit is had by me". According to the criteria above this would mean that rabbit is not the direct object of that sentence either - but, I believe, it is.

Can anyone help?

Solution 1:

A traditional definition of "direct object" is that it says what receives the action of the verb. The verb gives some action or event, and whatever the direct object refers to is affected by that action or event. By that test, in your example, "the door" is not a direct object, because the door needn't be affected by the cat running out of it.

The existence of a passive is also a pretty good test for direct objects, as you mentioned. If "the door" was a direct object in your example, you'd expect a corresponding passive "The door was run out by the cat". This does not sound very good, but a related form sounds much better: "Which door was run out of by the cat?" However, this can probably not show that "the door" is a direct object, since there is a construction called "prepositional passive" that makes the object of a preposition into a subject, rather than making a direct object into a subject.

Solution 2:

"to run" is a verb of movement, a verb class of its own, even if dictionaries only have meagre two verb classes (construction classes: transitive or intransitive). Verbs of movement normally have no direct object. Mostly they are followed by a where-to indication (destination). Also description of the course can follow such as to march through the woods/ across the fields. "The cat ran out of the door/AmE out the door" indicates the course the cat took. I would not say "out the door" is an adverb. In any case it is no direct object as it is a word group with a preposition.

It is a specialty of English that verbs of movement (vmov) can be constructed transitive (with a direct object). Then the vmov is followed by a noun/noun substitute as in "Hannibal marched his troops/them over the Alps into Italy". In other languages I know transitive use of vmov is not possible.

Solution 3:

As rogermue indicates in his answer, verbs of movement like run can actually have an object.

So let's introduce an actual object in that sentence:

The cat ran the mice out the door.

I think that it is very clear now that we have:

• a subject (the cat), which performs the action
• a verb (ran), which describes the action
• an object (the mice), who underwent the action
• an adverbial prepositional clause (out the door), which modifies ran, indicating where (or rather _in which direction) the action took place

If you are in doubt that the mice is an object, you can do your little passive-voice test:

The mice were run out the door by the cat.

Now the question is, when we remove the object, does an adverbial clause that happened to be in the sentence all of a sudden an object?
I see no reason why it would.

I ran a test yesterday.

If I remove the object (clearly, a test) from this sentence, sure, the meaning changes:

I ran yesterday.

But in both cases, yesterday just tells us when the action took place, whether I performed a test or an atletic feat. It does not become an object for any reason; why would an object tell me when something happened, anyway?