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You gave him the book.                       (1)

Based on the sentence (1), it seems to me that the following form of question is possible:

Whom did you give the book?            (2)

instead of

To whom did you give the book?       (3)

since him is an object of the verb "give".

I know (2) is rare. But, is (2) ungrammatical?

tchrist
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Aki
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    Consider "Whom did you send to the inquisitors?" and "To whom did you send the inquisitors?" If you drop the *tos, how are you going to figure out what "Whom did you send the inquisitors?"* means? – Peter Shor Feb 02 '16 at 14:56
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    @Peter: Another incisive example, as with your Suspect: "Try and convict me." Prosecutor: "Have it your way. We'll try and* convict you."* – FumbleFingers Feb 02 '16 at 15:07
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    One thing you state in your question is not exactly correct. "Him" is the indirect object of the sentence; "book" is the direct object. See this explanation: http://www.dailygrammar.com/Lesson-191-Indirect-Objects.htm – JLG Feb 02 '16 at 15:16
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    Nowadays nearly everyone will say: "Who did you give the book to?" The "To whom....?" construction is normally reserved for formal writing, and it's practically becoming obsolete or archaic. In twenty years time, it will have disappeared from the spoken vernacular. – Mari-Lou A Feb 02 '16 at 15:17
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    @PeterShor If people never used ambiguous expressions we'd be without words like "biannual" and the entire topic of double entendres. – Casey Feb 02 '16 at 19:28
  • @Casey: but there's no need to introduce *new* ambiguous expressions that are currently used very rarely. – Peter Shor Feb 02 '16 at 22:39
  • @PeterShor OK, but I don't think "who did you give the book?" sounds wrong. "Whom did you give the book?" is a little more questionable, but only because it combines "whom," which seems awfully formal, with a rather informal way of phrasing the rest of the question. – Casey Feb 02 '16 at 22:54
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    @PeterShor: That's like saying "I sent him a letter" is ambiguous because then how can we figure out what "I sent him" means. – herisson Feb 03 '16 at 00:10
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    @sumelic Exactly. You can't claim that a construction is ambiguous just because it's possible to contrive a special situation that makes it ambiguous. – Færd Feb 03 '16 at 02:46

5 Answers5

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Yes, (2) is ungrammatical.

You gave him the book is You gave the book to him after it goes through Dative alternation. After flipping the direct object and indirect object, the to preposition disappears.

You can't do this with questions, so you need the to.

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CDM
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    Your last sentence is not clear. You can edit your answer to be more specific on why Whom did you give the book? is ungrammatical. I think the first comment below the question is a bettter answer than yours. –  Feb 02 '16 at 17:05
  • @Rathony my answer clearly states there's no Dative Alternation in questions. If you feel that statement is over-inclusive, then I would love to hear your reasoning. If you feel that it's under-inclusive, then I don't know what to say. I think your making an issue of something that isn't an issue. The answer is correct. – CDM Feb 02 '16 at 17:20
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    @ChongDogMillionaire: Your clear claim is wrong. Both "You gave whom the book?" and "You gave the book to whom?" are perfectly grammatical, as are "You gave him the book?" and "You gave the book to him?". The rule you are trying to express, if any exists, has something to do with word order and nothing to do with questions. – Ben Voigt Feb 02 '16 at 17:22
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    @BenVoigt In your second question, dative alternation doesn't take place. Your third question is just a declarative statement with a different inflection at the end indicating it's a question. Your first question is interesting, you're just replacing him/her with whom... not sure if that's a formal or grammatical way of writing a question. I would agree all are idiomatic in speech though. – CDM Feb 02 '16 at 17:30

  • OP believes he can drop the to.

    I don't. I'm sorry to say this, but your answer explains nothing other than the statement that this is ungrammatical. My question is whether wh-movement of the indirect object is permissible.

     – Aki Feb 03 '16 at 07:39
  • @Aki your question suggests that you believe you can drop the to because dative alternation allows for it in declarative statements. Your first sentence example illustrates that. If you wanted an answer explaining why Wh-fronted indirect objects need the to but not so for Wh-fronted direct objects than you should have specified. I'm not trying to ruffle feathers, but based on (1) it seemed you were making a comparison between declarative statements and questions. – CDM Feb 03 '16 at 10:34
  • @BenVoigt also it should be noted that the questions you provided as illustrative examples are almost never used to ask for new information. Those questions are usually used to express disbelief about what was just said or ask for just said information to be repeated rather than to request fresh information. – CDM Feb 03 '16 at 10:40
  • Dropping "to" only makes sense to the sentence (3) which is derived from "You gave the book to him" by wh-movement of the object of "to", whereas I stated in my question that I constructed (2) "based on the sentence (1)". In fact other answers and comments suggest they understood what I meant. – Aki Feb 03 '16 at 13:17
  • @Aki "Based on the sentence (1), it seems to me that the following form of question is possible: Whom did you give the book?" The following form lacks a to. That sounds like you are trying to apply dative alternation to questions. It's ambiguous at best. My interpretation of your question was in good faith. Your (1) should have been "What did you give John?" to be clearer. – CDM Feb 03 '16 at 13:31
  • @aki also, you can't drop a to from (1) and (2) because there is no to. And wh-fronting the indirect object does not remove the need for the to. Despite the disagreements amongst grammarians stated in sulumeics' answer you should never drop the to with wh-fronted indirect objects with give-type verbs (pass, throw, bring, etc.) for idiomatic reasons. Who did you give the book to? who did you pass the ball to? Changing the whom to who is permissible in conversation and informal writing, a long with ending the question with to... but you should never drop the to. – CDM Feb 03 '16 at 13:43
  • "And wh-fronting the indirect object does not remove the need for the to." That is the problem. If "whom" comes immediately after "to", it is no longer an "indirect object". It is an object of the preposition "to". If the indirect object is wh-fronted, it never need "to" in front of it. This confusion makes your last sentence in your answer incomprehensible, which is the reason why some complain about it. – Aki Feb 03 '16 at 14:16
  • @Aki an indirect object doesn't stop being an indirect object because it comes after a to. For instance, I gave the book to John. John is still the indirect object. It's not really possible to infer that this is what you were confused about from your post. – CDM Feb 03 '16 at 15:25
  • @AKI also, just in case you are confused about the who/whom distinction, there is no distinction in questions like Who did you give the book to? and Whom did you give the ball to? both have the same meaning in conversation (they are both indirect objects even if you put a to in front). However, in writing, using who in your context should be avoided because it's ungrammatical. – CDM Feb 03 '16 at 15:59
  • No, I'm not. Probably you need to read this. – Aki Feb 04 '16 at 00:31
  • @AKI A word can have more than one type of syntactic function/label. I gave the book to John. John is still the indirect object because he gets the object. No one who answered this question said anything about the indirect object no longer being an indirect object because of wh-fronting or placing to before the indirect object. – CDM Feb 04 '16 at 11:10
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    @AKI if you believe the indirect object stops being an indirect object because of wh-fronting, then your question is based on a false premise... John is both the indirect object and the object within a prepositional phrase (object of a preposition) in I gave the book to John. – CDM Feb 04 '16 at 11:12
  • I didn't claim that an indirect object is not an indirect object after wh-fronting. I was not right in claiming an indirect object is no longer an indirect object when placed immediately after a preposition. See the quotation from "indirect object" entry of the Oxford dictionary of English in the comment below. – Aki Feb 05 '16 at 02:28
  • "In traditional grammar, any noun phrase with a DATIVE function is an indirect object, whatever its position. Typically, when placed after the direct object the indirect object requires to or for (e.g. They bought a bicycle for her, and gave it to her). Modern grammars vary as to whether they classify such prepositional phrases as indirect objects or not." – Aki Feb 05 '16 at 02:29
  • And, the following is the quotation from CGEL: "They gave me the key (iC)""Example [ic] has the same propositional meaning as They gave the key to me, but to me is not an indirect object, not an object at all: it is syntactically quite different from me in [ic]. Objects normally have the form of NPs; to me here is a complement with the form of a PP. " – Aki Feb 05 '16 at 02:43
  • Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. – Matt E. Эллен Feb 09 '16 at 10:45
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Saying "Whom did you give the book?" is rare seems to me an understatement; I haven't found any actual examples of sentences like this. (As far as I know, who can always be used instead of whom, so I'm treating "Who did you give the book" the same way in this answer.) Despite the rarity, I have found conflicting statements from grammar experts about whether it is definitely ungrammatical (which may reflect a similar variance in native speakers' intuitions.) All of them agree that is is at the very least infelicitous for many speakers.

As ChongDogMillionare said, the fact that we can say

You gave him the book.

(using a noun phrase "him") as well as

You gave the book to him

(using a prepositional phrase "to him") is called dative alternation. We can use the noun phrase form in some complex sentences, such as passives (He was given the book) and interrogative sentences where the direct object is fronted (What did you give him?).

So, your question is basically: can we use the noun phrase variant in an interrogative sentence with a fronted indirect object? (Whom did you give the book?)

My intuition is that you can't. But I don't know why not! In the comments, Ben Voight gave an example sentence You gave whom the book? and suggested it was grammatical. I don't know if I agree; it sounds awkward to me, but I don't know if that means it's ungrammatical. If it is grammatical, and Whom did you give the book? isn't, then the issue must be with the fronting specifically. There are other syntactic differences between questions with fronting/wh-movement and those with wh-in-situ, like the use of an auxiliary (did in this case).

Here is a relevant quotation that says the sentence is ungrammatical for this reason:

Wh-movement distinguishes between direct and indirect object: *Who did you give a book?; What did you give John?

(Essays on Anaphora, by H. Lasnik)

It's a convention in linguistics to use a preceding asterisk to mark a sentence as ungrammatical. But I also found this:

Wh-movement of the indirect object from the V NP NP frame is generally regarded as infelicitous. Fodor (1978) explains this with reference to a processing restriction she terms the XX Extraction Constraint. In parsing a string in which the indirect object has Wh-moved, the parser would have difficulty detecting the gap since its expectation that an NP will follow the verb is in fact met by the direct object NP. [...]

?Who will the children show the new toy?

("Prior Linguistic Knowledge and the Conservatism of the Learning Procedure: Grammaticality Judgements of Unilingual and Multilingual Speakers", by Helmut Zobl)

The wording here doesn't seem quite as strong ("infelicitous") and a question mark is used, which indicates less certainty that it is ungrammatical than an asterisk would.

And here is another quotation that implies that some speakers find it grammatical, even though many others don't:

Testing superiority effects in English double object constructions is also tricky, since for many speakers wh-movement of indirect objects is impossible even if the indirect object is the only wh-element. However, for speakers that do allow wh-extraction of indirect objects, the predicted contrast does appear to hold, as shown in (85a-b).

(85) a. ?? Whomi did John give ti what?
b.* Whati did John give whom ti?

(Symmetry in Syntax: Merge, Move, and Labels, by Barbara Citko)

Here, ti represents an imperceptible trace left behind before the indirect or direct object is moved.

I found a source that points to some further discussion:

Another asymmetry[...] has often been noticed in the literature on double object constructions (cf. Hudson, 1992; Larson, 1988; Oehrle, 1976):

(11) a. What did she send her sister t?
b. ?*Who did she send t a book?
c. Her sister was sent t a book.
d. ?*A book was sent her sister t.

[...]Wh-Movement can extract the direct object in a double object construction, whereas NP movement can extract the indirect object. Neither of these processes is problematic. However, the reverse pattern of extractions is problematic for many speakers (cf. Hudson, 1992, who discusses variability in judgements here.)

("Constraints on Argument Structure," by Kenneth Hale, Samuel J. Keyser, in Syntactic Theory and First Language Acquisition: Cross-linguistic perspectives Vol. 1 Heads, Projections, and Learnability by Barbara Lust, Margarita Suñer, John Whitman)

I found a PDF of the relevant paper by Hudson, "So-called “double objects” and grammatical relations."

I also found an interesting example sentence that seems similar but is treated as grammatical, although it has an additional interrogative word:

Who did you give what at Christmas?

(Pragmatic Syntax, by Jieun Kiaer)

Supplement:

Here are some examples I found on Google Books of "whom" being fronted like this without an accompanying preposition: Founding the Fatimid State: The Rise of an Early Islamic Empire, by Hamid Haji; The Coronation, by Thomas Capps; Folk-tales of Salishan and Sahaptin tribes, by F. Boas; Rainbow Six, by Tom Clancy; "South Cove Community Health Center Newsletter," July 2011.

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herisson
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  • Thank you for the detailed explanations and enlightening comments. I've found some books you mentioned. So, I will spend some time reading them. – Aki Feb 03 '16 at 07:50
  • One possible reasoning I found is that the indirect object is not questioned since only the last part (direct object) carries a new information. What do you think? – Aki Feb 03 '16 at 08:11
  • @Aki: I still have to finish reading Hudson and think about what he says. The idea that it has to do with information structure is interesting; I wonder if that is why two of the examples sentences where it is treated as being possibly grammatical have a second question word as the direct object ("Whom did John give what?" and "Who did you give what at Christmas?") – herisson Feb 03 '16 at 08:23

  • two of the examples sentences where it is treated as being possibly grammatical have a second question word as the direct object. Yes, of course!

     – Aki Feb 03 '16 at 10:11
  • For the record, “Whom did you give the book?”, “Whom did she send a book?”, “Whom will the children show their new toy?”, and “Whom did John give what?” are all perfectly grammatical and natural-sounding to me (to the extent that a question about who gave whom what can ever sound natural, that is). In normal speech, I would almost certainly add the to myself, but I don’t think I would even notice if someone did not do so. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Apr 11 '17 at 17:00
  • Reading this again now (though I didn’t remember reading it before and was as surprised that these were considered ungrammatical by some as I presumably was when I wrote the previous comment), it struck me that there are cases where dative alternation is not possible and the version with to is highly infelicitous, if not ungrammatical. “Who(m) should I give a good kick in the ass?” is fine to me, but even declaratively, “*I gave a good kick in the ass to him” is downright ungrammatical. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 08 '19 at 00:26
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1)/You gave the book to him/ is the declarative form of:

To whom did you give the book? A standard English formal form

2)/You gave him the book/ is the declarative form of:

Did you give him the book

. That said, in colloquial spoken English, nowadays, people will often say:

Who did you give the book to? for 1)

Lambie
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    Don't forget that "you can never end a sentence with a preposition". ;) (disclaimer: I consider that rule outdated nonsense and will end sentences with prepositions if I want to) – John Clifford Feb 02 '16 at 15:16
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    I thought I had accounted for that rather specifically. Standard formal English plural versus colloquial spoken English. Isn't that eggs in your beer?? – Lambie Feb 02 '16 at 15:19
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    Hypothetically, what about Whom did you give the book to? – Stu W Feb 02 '16 at 15:19
  • I was pointing out the specific objection to the colloquial form rather than implying that you hadn't accounted for it, Lambie. @Stu: if you were writing it that way you'd use "who" rather than "whom". Because reasons. – John Clifford Feb 02 '16 at 15:21
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    /Whom did you give the book to/ is grammatical also, though not ""hyper formal". What isn't grammatical is: /Whom did you give the book/ – Lambie Feb 02 '16 at 15:23
  • @JohnClifford If the last word of a sentence is a preposition, then it is no longer pre-positioned before its object, and it disappears in a puff of logic. (Often such purported prepositions are in fact acting as another part of speech.) – Monty Harder Feb 02 '16 at 21:52
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    The relationship between "You gave the book to him"/"To whom did you give the book" is not the same as the one between "You gave him the book"/"Did you give him the book?" The equivalent interrogative sentence for the first sentence would be "Did you give the book to him?" The original post asks if "Whom did you give the book?" is grammatical; can you please answer this explicitly in your post? – herisson Feb 03 '16 at 02:25
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    @sumelic I have given what is grammatical. I said the OP's way of stating it is not grammatical. You gave x to y is: To whom did you give x? You have y the x: Did you give y the x? Ergo: /Whom did you give the book/ is not grammatical. How many times must one say it/ – Lambie Apr 13 '17 at 18:44
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It's not technically correct. but most people would understand it, since in English, you can generally drop extra words as long as your meaning is still clear in context.

Let's consider another form: Whom did you give the book to? (4)

These sentences (2) What place did you go? (3) To what place did you go? (4) What place did you go to? are all equivalent to a native speaker, although (4) sounds a little wordy.

Joel M Ward
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    'What place did you go?" seems to have the same problem as "Whom did you give the book?" Normally, I would use "to" at the end of both of these. (Well, actually, in this specific case I would use "Where did you go?") – herisson Feb 03 '16 at 00:01
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    Even though I don't think I would drop "to" in this context, it seems plausible to me that some people would, but do you have any examples or prior discussion you can point to? – herisson Feb 03 '16 at 02:27
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Unusual but almost correct ! Here's why ? "Whom did you give the book ?" is rather complex to let's think you could save the preposition to with whom. But "Whom did you read ?" works because it's a direct interrogative. "Whom are you talking to ?" also because we have a complete sentence. So you can't forget the to with an accusative ; if you do so, drop the accusative ! "Whom are you talking ?" is not correct either. And "Who did you give the book" seems to me acceptable beside we don't know exactly who gave the book to whom :) in a question where we may have an inversion of the verb... So that's why you wanted Whom to start !

DAVE
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