View Single Post
  #2  
Old October 23, 2008, 03:24 PM
Rusty's Avatar
Rusty Rusty is offline
Señor Speedy
 
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: USA
Posts: 11,337
Native Language: American English
Rusty has a spectacular aura aboutRusty has a spectacular aura about
Give me is a command, or an imperative. In the imperative, pronouns are suffixed. Note that the originally stressed syllable of the imperative must be retained through the addition of pronouns!

Dame la perforadora. (Dar is a single-syllable verb, so suffixing the indirect object pronoun me to it doesn't change which syllable is stressed - the normal second-to-the-last syllable is stressed, and this means the only syllable of the imperative receives the stress.)
Dámela. (Give it to me. The addition of both the direct and indirect object pronouns requires an accent in the imperative to retain the original stress. Without the accent, the second-to-the-last syllable would fall on the indirect object and the command could be misunderstood.)

If you want to say, "Are you giving me the hole punch," you would be using the indicative, present tense (asking a question, of course). In that case, the object pronouns precede the verb:
¿Me da la perforadora?
¿Me la da?

Last edited by Rusty; October 23, 2008 at 03:31 PM.
Reply With Quote