Lend and Borrow - The Explanation!

We have had a couple of comments on the mixing up of lend and borrow in the dialect, so I think it is worth taking the time to point out the differences between the two and why.

We will have to use some linguistic jargon to explain the differences, but I will try to keep it simple.

First things first; to lend and to borrow are both verbs, and as such they tell us what is going on in the sentence in terms of who or what is doing what to who.

More specifically they are both transitive verbs, which means that they have to take a grammatical object (normally referred to as simply 'an object'); in this case the thing that is being lent or borrowed.

This means that just "I lend" or "I borrow" sounds weird. And indeed it does sound incomplete!

To make things a little more complicated, transitive verbs can be further subdivided into monotransitive, ditransitive, and even tritransitive verbs, depending on how many objects they take (1, 2 or 3, respectively).

So, to get back to our mixed up verbs, to borrow is a monotransitive verb. This means that it only takes one object. For example:

• I borrow a book.

The bolded 'book' is the object, and because borrow only takes one object, the sentence looks and sounds fine.

To lend, on the other hand, is a ditransitive verb. This means that it has to take two objects. For example:

• I lend her a book.

The bolded 'book' is still the object, but because we now have two objects we need to be able to differentiate between them. Therefore, 'book' it is now called the direct object and is still the thing that is being lent. The underlined her is called the indirect object and is the person to whom the book is being lent.

The sentence looks and sounds fine because lend has two objects and is therefore linguistically happy.

The problem arises when we use borrow to mean lend. We subconciously know that the thing we are talking about is lending, and we also subconciously know that the verb lend needs two objects, but we actually say borrow, which only needs one.

It is this inate, subconcious knowledge of the grammar of our own language that allows us to hear when something is not quite right. For example, using the same underline for the indirect object and bold for the direct object notations as before (including an asterix, which is the standard linguistic way of showing that something in ungrammatical), we can see the two objects used with borrow, and thus see why it sounds odd:

• *I'll borrow you a tenner.

The reverse is also true.

If we use lend with only one object, it also sounds odd:

• *Will you lend a tenner?

Here the indirect object is missing and therefore leads us to ask the question, "Lend who a tenner?"

So, there we are. A bit long and technical, but I hope it made sense.