A Study of How Persian Indirect Objects Are Expressed in Russian

An indirect object is a grammatical form in Persian. Indeed, it is a propositional phrase, and the relationship between the verb and its complement is only built up by a preposition. When it comes to Russian, the indirect object is not necessarily a prepositional phrase and it is governed in two ways. First, the verb directly governs the grammatical case of the object. Second, the governing of the object’s grammatical case is carried out by the preposition. The indirect object has a special feature as it plays a number of semantic roles for the message in the sentence. As far as Russian is concerned, the grammatical case is the criterion for recognizing meaning. In other words, a specific grammatical case is used for each semantic role. In the present study, we identified ten semantic roles for the indirect object in Persian, which are recipient, malefactive, beneficiary, stimulus, result, source, theme, goal, instrument and audience. Each indirect object which holds one of these semantic roles—according to the meaning of its verb of course—can be expressed in Russian through the following methods 1). Accusative case with no preposition needed; 2). Accusative case with prepositions needed “на”, “в” and “про”; 3). Dative case without or with prepositions “к” and “по”; 4). Genitive case without or with prepositions “от” and “у”; 5). Instrumental case without or with prepositions “за” and “с” and 6). Prepositional case with preposition “о”.