Learn English – Relative pronoun “whom” used as an indirect object of a verb with two objects

dative-alternationindirect-objectspassive-voiceprepositionsrelative-pronouns

We have verbs in English with 2 objects, such as "send," "ask," "give," etc.. For instance, we can say:

  1. I gave the book to John.

or

  1. I gave John the book.

In both of these sentences, "the book" is the direct object and "John" is the indirect object. The rule is that we can use the indirect object with or without a preposition. Now, consider that we want to use the indirect object "John" in the following sentence and modify it with whom:

  1. He saw John, to whom the book was given.

or in another form, we can say:

  1. He saw John, whom the book was given to.

However, my question is that whether or not we can eliminate that "to" from our sentences. In other words, write:

  1. He saw John, whom the book was given.

In this last sentence, I am using the rule which I used in the sentence at the beginning of my question.

Best Answer

(A small issue that doesn't relate to the grammaticality: it seems unnatural to me to use a defining relative clause after a proper noun, at least in this particular sentence. So I'm going to use commas before the relative clauses in all of the sentences that I discuss.)

Like any other clause, a relative clause generally needs a subject. In your sentence (2), "I gave John the book," "I" is the subject. If it were possible to form a relative clause with the same grammatical structure as sentence (2), it would be as follows:

  1. ?He saw John, whom I gave the book.

This sounds (barely) grammatical to me, but I expect many other people would find it ungrammatical. I don't think a native speaker would ever prefer this over an alternative formed from "I gave the book to John":

  1. He saw John, to whom I gave the book.
  2. He saw John, who(m) I gave the book to.

Sentence (3) might be a marginal case like "Whom did you give the book?": as far as I could determine, all native speakers agree that the preceding sentence sounds bad, but there is disagreement about whether it is outright ungrammatical.

It took some searching through a number of examples of "to whom I gave [direct object]" for me to find one example of "whom I gave [direct object]" in Google Books:

Next morning I found many men and women dead, whom I gave water last night. (Hiroshima, by John Hersey)

Passive-voice versions of ditransitive verbs

In your proposed sentence "He saw John whom the book was given," you've removed the original subject of the sentence, the pronoun "I." But as I mentioned previously, the relative clause is required to have a subject. The subject can't be "whom," as that is an object pronoun. The only remaining noun phrase is "the book." This is an object in your sentence (2). So your proposed sentence would have to use a passive voice structure, where the relative clause corresponds to an independent sentence like the following:

  1. *The book was given John.

This kind of passive voice is disfavored in present-day English: it sounds archaic at best, and just wrong at worst.

In general, people only use the following passive forms for ditransitive verbs:

  1. The book was given to John.
  2. John was given the book.

So it would be grammatical to say either of the following:

  1. He saw John, to whom the book was given.
  2. He saw John, who was given the book.
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