Fingers’ Grammar Clinic

AUDIO DR FINGERS’GRAMMAR CLINIC

Dear Dr Fingers, Last month you told us about direct and indirect objects. I wanted to know what happened to these objects in questions with “who”. For example, look at the following sentence: “Michael gave a box to the teacher.” Now if you make a question from this it is like this, I think: “Who did Michael give the box to?” Is that correct? And if it is correct, why do we have to use the preposition “to” at the end? Conchi (by e-mail).

Dear Conchi, Thank you very much for your question. I would be delighted to try and help you. Basically, with your sentence, we can make two questions with “who”. The first one could refer to the subject of the sentence, which in this case is Michael: Question: “Who gave the box to the teacher?” Answer: “Michael gave the box to the teacher.” And the second type of question could refer to the indirect object (the person who received the box), which in this case is the teacher. Notice how the preposition is at the end of the sentence: Question: “Who did Michael give the box to?” Answer: “Michael gave the box to the teacher.” So how do we know which preposition to use?

Prepositions & Indirect Objects

In this particular case it is relatively easy. The sentence we were looking at was like this: “Michael gave a box to the teacher”. We can immediately see that the preposition is “to”. However, in other cases it isn’t so easy. Just have a look at this sentence: “Peter gave Jane a bicycle.” In this sentence the indirect object (Jane) is not at the end of the sentence, and there is no accompanying preposition. What we have to do, is change the order of the sentence so the indirect object comes at the end: “Peter gave the bicycle to Jane.” Now we can see the indirect object with its correct preposition. And now, if we want to make a question related to this situation we would write it like this: “Who did Peter give the bicycle to?”

Here are some more examples: “Sarah brought Daniel some food.” “Sarah brought some food for Daniel.” “Who did Sarah bring some food for?”

And one more: “Sam wrote Frank a letter.” “Sam wrote a letter to Frank.” “Who did Sam write a letter to?”

I hope that has answered your question, and I wish you all the best in the future. Well, now I must go and lie down now because I’m so exhausted. Yours, Dr Fingers.

Today’s class: questions with “who” & indirect speech