There was a time when a girl like Cathy would have been called possessed by the devil. She would have been exorcised to cast out the evil spirit, and if after many trials that did not work, she would have been burned as a witch for the good of the community. The one thing that may not be forgiven a witch is her ability to distress people, to make them restless and uneasy and even envious.
(John Steinbeck, East of Eden)
There’s a passive voice followed by a noun phrase, a witch, in the sentence. The sentence needs to be ‘the one thing that may not be forgiven for a witch~’ or ‘the one thing that a witch may not be forgiven.’ Then why is the noun phrase in the middle of the sentence?
Answer
As WendiKidd comments, it’s really something of an older style of sentence structure. Today we’d be more likely to include the preposition in…
The one thing that may not be forgiven in a witch is [blah blah].
Learners might find it simpler if we revert to the more standard Subject-Verb-Object sequence…
[blah blah] is the one thing that may not be forgiven in a witch.
Prepositions are very important in English, since word-order is often flexible (witness the above reversal), and we don’t have many inflections to indicate what grammatical role a word has in an utterance. But the language is constantly evolving, so it often turns out that the preferred preposition (or omission thereof) changes over decades and centuries.
Another related example with forgive is…
[His wife] forgave him his infidelity
which today might more often be expressed as
[His wife] forgave him for his infidelity
As you can see, the verb to forgive can be used with either or both of two different types of “object” (the sin, and the sinner)…
[He was very rude, but]…
I forgave him.
I forgave his rudeness. (syntactically, the rudeness; his is just a kind of determiner here)
I forgave him his rudeness.
I forgave him for his rudeness.
*I forgave his rudeness him.
As is normal in such ditransitive constructions, if one of the two objects is a beneficiary or target of the action, that usually has to come before the other (“direct”) object unless there’s a standard preposition usage that makes the interrelationships clear. My final example above is “invalid” as it stands, and I’m not sure there actually is a way to make the sequence valid by using a preposition.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Listenever , Answer Author : FumbleFingers
