Spanish Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, teachers, students and Spanish language enthusiasts in general wanting to discuss the finer points of the language. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I was wondering if you should ever attach the indirect and direct object pronoun to a conjugated verb, and if so, when that would occur?
For example, let's say I wanted to convert "La maestra da un examen a nosotros" to use the indirect and direct object pronouns:
La maestra nos lo da.
La maestra danoslo.
Which should I use?
The position of those pronouns before or after the verb is given by the rules which are in the section 3 of this link of RAE.
A quick summary of what RAE says in that link:
They have to go before the verb:
They have to go after the verb:
In your example you are using the verb dar in the indicative mood. For that reason those pronouns should be placed before the verb. So the correct one would be:
La maestra nos lo da.
You have to take into account that the word "da" can be a present of indicative but also an imperative:
(Él/Ella) da - present of indicative
da (tú) - imperative
So if you place the pronouns after the verb then people would think you are using imperative:
Nos lo da --> He gives it to us
Dánoslo --> Give it to us. (imperative)
So yor second sentence:
La maestra dánoslo* (Incorrect)
would be incorrect because you can't use "la maestra" with an imperative.
The correct form is the first one. Alternatively:
Danoslo la maestra
But you'll rarely find this construct in prose.
Although both forms are correct, the second one sounds extremely archaic/poetical. You should never attach pronouns in normal speech, the natural one is
Nos lo da. (She gives it to us)
The exception are imperatives. Imperatives are always attached, otherwise you'd confuse an affirmative sentence with an order:
¡Dánoslo! (give us that)
(and don't forget the accent mark).
