Please explain the meaning in the context [closed]

Question: I have been told by my instructor that you need to question who or what to the verb to get the direct object. Also she said that wherever there are prepositional phrases there is no object.

"He invited us to his birthday celebration."

Please justify why the sentence has a direct object. Also please explain what is a prepositional phrase in the context and why it is so?

Solution 1:

Usually, a indirect object stands between the verb and the direct object. If an indirect object is to follow the direct object, it must be part of a prepositional phrase.

• He gave me the book.
• He gave the book to me.

Perhaps this is where your assertion comes from; here we have a prepositional phrase instead of an indirect object. Certainly there is no reason to say that wherever there are prepositional phrases there is no object, and your own example proves that's not true.

Fowler (3rd edn) puts it thus

In grammar, the person or thing secondarily affected by the action stated in the verb, if expressed by a noun alone (i.e. without to, for, etc.), is called the indirect object. In Latin and Greek it is recognizable, as it once was in English, by being in the dative, while the direct object is in the accusative. The English dative now having no separate form, the indirect object must be otherwise identified, usu. by the fact that it stands between the verb and the direct object (e.g. Hand me that book), and, if it is to follow the direct object, must be replaced by a prepositional phrase (e.g. Hand that book to me).

Variations are

1. when no direct object is expressed, as in You told me yourself;
2. when the direct object is a mere pronoun and is allowed to precede, as I told it you before (but not I told the story you before);
3. when the indirect object comes after a passive verb, as It was told me in confidence.

Note: Variations (2) and (3) are now distinctly archaic. A speaker would now be more likely to say I told you that (or about it) before; it was told to me in confidence.

Solution 2:

The quintessential English sentence John hit the ball has the syntactic constituent order "Subject + Verb + NP (Object)." This is pretty much the case with your sentence, only that it has a PP (to his birthday party) tacked at the end. You can say that prepositional phrase (PP) is nothing but a group of words that starts with a preposition (to here), and essentially does the work of a preposition. That's all there is to it ( at least, on a rudimentary level.)