Not wishing to turn this into an argument, but:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Humble  You can't possibly deny it in I gave it to Mom and I gave it (a dog) a piece of bread reflects different relations between the subject and the object. |
I'm not sure what you mean here, but how can you tell the difference between the direct and the indirect object in each sentence? It's not the case, because there is no difference at all between "it" as a direct object and "it" as an indirect object. The only difference is that "to" appears in the first sentence, indicating that the second object is indirect; in the second sentence, the omission of "to" indicates that the second object is direct.
Russian, on the other hand, has a well-developed case system with, as you say, six cases and at least two subcases. You could rearrange the words in a Russian clause quite radically and the meaning would not change; in English, if you rearrange the words, the meaning often changes.
I don't know what nationality crussell is, so I don't know how useful this discussion is to him/her.