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Up to her death in 1935 she did not open to me her secret.
Then she explained to me the cause of her refusal.
3. If the indirect recipient object is attached to a verb of benefaction other than those listed above, its form
and position vary according to certain rules:
a) The indirect recipient object is non-prepositional when it precedes the direct object.
She offered him a sandwich.
Jane sang me a song.
b) The indirect recipient object is prepositional when it follows the direct object. In this case the most
frequent preposition is to.
She has given some kind of task to each girl.
I’m going to offer something to you.
If the indirect recipient object denotes a person for whose benefit the action is done, it has the preposition
for.
I’ll buy this for you.
) The position of the indirect recipient object after the direct object is sometimes obligatory. This is the case
either when both objects are personal pronouns, as in:
Give him to me.
Send me to them.
or when the direct object is a personal pronoun, while the indirect object is a noun, as in
Give them to Nanny.
Show it to John.
If the direct object is the pronoun it and the indirect recipient object is any other personal pronoun, the
indirect recipient object may take the preposition or not.
Give it to him = Give it him.
The latter is more colloquial.
§ 76. Sometimes the indirect recipient object may be placed before the predicate verb. This occurs in the
following cases:
1. In pronominal questions referring to the indirect recipient object or its attribute.
Whom did you show the brooch to?
To whom did you send the parcel?
Which boy has she given the money to?
To which porter did you give your suitcase?
As seen from the examples, the preposition to can either retain its position after the direct object or come
before the question word. Questions of the first type are characteristic of colloquial style, while those of the
second type are formal.
Note: