By Direct questions, Indirect questions

I thought that will and would(future) mustn't follow the word if.Have I been wrong all this time?That 'rule' does not apply to indirect questions. I don't know if/whether ... will ... I didn't know if/whether ... would ... I'm not sure if/whether ... will ... I wasn't sure if/whether ......

I think YL's suggestion is good. And don't neglect this possibility: Can you tell me the last time you saw him? As for the word order of an indirect question with heavy clauses, you can be flexible. You don't need to strand the verb way at the end if it sounds very awkward. Your case b...

"Do you know who he is?" "Who do you think he is?" The structures are as follows. Indirect question derived from Who is he? embedded in the direct yes/no question Do you know? (You know?) the answer to the question (who is he?). > (Do you know) the answer to the question (who he...

Unfortunately, this is an area of English which may be slowly undergoing a change. Not only do non-native speakers have difficulty with it, but a surprising number of educated native speakers seem to be using the inverted structure "incorrectly" more and more. It is so prevalent that some...

The correcto one is "Do you know where it is", because this is an indirect question. The interrogative pronoun is in the middle of the sentence

Clive wrote:The bottom line, of course, is that any of these systems is OK as long as it provides a tool that someone finds useful in learning to speak good English. Would you call this a relative clause? I don't know where the pen is. What would you say it relates to? When I asked this, I...

When I asked this, I thought you might reply that it relates to the term or idea of 'a location'. You surprised me by answering in my grammar the clause in bold is an indirect question, not a relative clause. I don't see it as any kind of question at all. Would you also see I know where the pen...

Hi CB, I share many of the basic opinions you have expressed. I, too, learned my grammar as a schoolboy. I think that in many ways, we spend the rest of our lives as 'prisoners' of what we originally learned. As you do, and although I teach English for a living, I often see grammatical...

Clive wrote:Would you call this a relative clause? I don't know where the pen is. What would you say it relates to?Hi CliveI learned my grammatical terminology as a schoolboy and as far as I can remember most of the terms I learned were applicable to all the languages I studied. There were/are...

Clive wrote:I don't see any of these as relative clauses. They are noun clauses. eg noun clause I read what he wrote.eg relative clause I read the letter which he wrote. Here, which he wrote is relative (ie relates to) the noun 'letter'. I don't see any indirect questions, either. Hi...