Object pronoun
In linguistics, an object pronoun is a personal pronoun that is used typically as a grammatical object: the direct or indirect object of a verb, or the object of a preposition. Object pronouns contrast with subject pronouns. Object pronouns in English take the objective case, sometimes called the oblique case or object case.
For example, the English object pronoun me is found in "They see me", "He's giving me my book", and "Sit with me" ; this contrasts with the subject pronoun in "I see them," "I am getting my book," and "I am sitting here."
Modern English
The English personal and interrogative pronouns have the following subject and object forms:Archaic second person forms
Historically, Middle English and Early Modern English retained the T–V distinction; the second person pronoun had separate singular/familiar and plural/formal forms with subject and object forms of both. In standard modern forms of English, all second person forms have been reduced to simply "you". These forms are still retained in some dialects of Northern English, Scottish English, and in the Scots language, a Germanic language closely related to English which diverged from it during the Early Modern period.| Singular/familiar subject pronoun | Singular/familiar object pronoun |
| thou | thee |
| Plural/formal subject pronoun | Plural/formal object pronoun |
| ye | you |
Other languages
In some languages the direct object pronoun and the indirect object pronoun have separate forms. For example, in the Spanish object pronoun system, direct object: Lo mandaron a la escuela and indirect object: Le mandaron una carta. Other languages divide object pronouns into a larger variety of classes.On the other hand, many languages, for example Persian, do not have distinct object pronouns: Man Farsi balad-am. Man ra mishenasad..
History
Object pronouns, in languages where they are distinguished from subject pronouns, are typically a vestige of an older case system. English, for example, once had an extensive declension system that specified distinct accusative and dative case forms for both nouns and pronouns. And after a preposition, a noun or pronoun could be in either of these cases, or in the genitive or instrumental case. With the exception of the genitive, in nouns this system disappeared entirely, while in personal pronouns it collapsed into a single case, covering the roles of both accusative and dative, as well as all instances after a preposition. That is, the new oblique case came to be used for the object of either a verb or a preposition, contrasting with the genitive, which links two nouns.For a discussion of the use of historically object pronouns in subject position in English, see the article on English personal pronouns.