An object is a grammatical relation assigned to certain complements of a verb. In a typical active construction it identifies a core participant other than the subject, often an entity affected by the event. This is a grammatical classification rather than a requirement that the referent be a physical object.[ref]
Universal Dependencies annotation guidelines. obj, Definition, core argument and relation to other object categories
In
Mira opened the gate, the gate is an object. In The gate was opened by Mira, the same participant is instead the subject of a passive voice construction. The event can remain closely related while the grammatical relationships change.An explicit annotation scheme also needs boundaries among complements. Universal Dependencies distinguishes
obj from iobj and from other dependent relations; a traditional label “object” does not automatically determine the appropriate code. This makes syntactic dependency criteria part of the analysis needed to compare annotated text corpus resources. New to topics? Read the docs here!