Indirect Questions

Frequently asked questions

• What is the difference between an indirect question and reported speech?

  Both use the same word order but do different jobs. In an indirect question you are asking, just politely wrapped: "Could you tell me when the meeting starts?" You expect an answer now. In reported speech you are relaying what somebody else asked: "She asked when the meeting started." Nobody expects an answer, and the verb usually shifts one step back in time. The good news is that the word order transfers: get it right here and reported questions come almost free.

• Why is "Do you know where does he work?" wrong?

  Because the auxiliary has already been used by the opener. "Do you know" is what asks the question, so the rest of the sentence runs on as a statement: "Do you know where he works?" The error comes from years of drilling direct questions with do-support — "Where does he work?" — and then carrying that pattern into the embedded clause. Watch the ending too: it travels from the auxiliary back onto the main verb, so "he works", not "he work".

• Why does "I would like to know when the contract expires." end with a full stop rather than a question mark?

  Because the punctuation follows the opener, not your intention. "I would like to know…" is grammatically a statement about what you want, so it closes with a full stop, even though you plainly expect a reply. If the sentence starts with a genuine question such as "Could you tell me…" or "Do you know…", the question mark belongs at the end. In practice you will see the occasional question mark after "I was wondering…", where the line functions as a request; the full stop remains the clean default.

• Is it if or whether — and is there a British-versus-American difference?

  In most embedded yes/no questions both work, in British and in American English alike. The visible tendency is one of register rather than region: formal written English on both sides of the Atlantic leans towards whether, while conversation leans towards if. Two positions are fixed regardless of variety: after a preposition ("We talked about whether…") and before a to-infinitive ("not sure whether to sign"), whether is the one that works. So the regional difference here is smaller than most learners expect.

• How does this lesson fit into my learning path?

  Before you practise indirect questions, you should be able to build direct ones reliably — that is what *questions-in-english* (A2) drills. Only once subject-auxiliary inversion is automatic do you notice that it disappears inside an embedded clause. Alongside this lesson, *email-requests* (B1) is the natural pairing: it puts the same openers to work in real business email. The step after that is *reported-questions-commands* (B2), where the same word order returns, this time to relay what other people asked.

• Why does the inversion disappear in the embedded clause at all?

  English marks direct questions by inverting the subject and the auxiliary, while subordinate clauses hold on to the fixed subject-verb-object order. The moment the question moves into a subordinate clause, the subordinate rule takes over and the inversion drops out. German solves the same problem differently: the finite verb sits in second position in a main clause and at the end in a subordinate clause. Both languages therefore signal the main-clause and subordinate-clause split through word order, just at different points in the sentence. Seen that way, the English rule looks a good deal less arbitrary.