EXERCISE 4CHANGE THE FOLLOWING DIRECT QUOTATION YES-NO QUESTIONS TO...

15. I asked my brother, “Did Mom give you a call about the party?”The formation of indirect information questions is much like the formation of indirect yes-no questions. Here is an example:Direct: He asked, “Where are the kids going?”Indirect: He asked where the kids were going.The one difference is that indirect information questions do not use if or whether. Everything else is the same: the verb subject word order of the direct question changes to the statement word order of subject verb.Here are two more examples:Direct: She asked, “Why is it so hot in here?”Indirect: She asked why it was so hot in there.Direct: They asked, “Whom should we contact?”Indirect: They asked whom we should contact.If the interrogative pronoun happens to play the role of the subject, then the direct question has a special word order in which the subject (the interrogative pronoun) and the verb are already in statement word order (rather than the expected question word order). For example:Direct: He asked, “Who gave us the information?”The subject who is in front of the verb gave. In other words, the word order of the direct question is exactly the same as the word order of the indirect question:Indirect: He asked who had given us the information.The peculiar word order results from the fact that the interrogative pronoun is also the subject. In all other cases, the interrogative pronoun plays the role of object or adverb, and as such, the interrogative pronoun plays no role in subject verb word order issues.As we would expect, when the direct question uses the dummy helping verb do, the do will disappear from the indirect question for exactly the same reasons it disappears from indirect yes-no questions. For example:Direct: He asked, “When does the movie start?”Indirect: He asked when the movie started.When the tense marker is moved back to the fi rst real verb, there is no need for the dummy do to continue to carry the tense marker, and so do disappears.Here are some more examples involving do:Direct: John asked, “What did Sally say?”Indirect: John asked what Sally said.Direct: John asked, “Whom did Bob want to see?”Indirect: John asked whom Bob wanted to see.