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Showing posts from June 19, 2026

Interrogative or relative adverb: "how are you" or "how you are"

The following sentence has the words in the wrong order: "He told me how is he getting to the party this evening." The correct order should be: "He told me how he is getting to the party this evening."  The reason for the mistake is that the word "how" appears to be a normal interrogative (question-word), which would require the object and verb to be inverted as in, for example, "How are you?" (Not: "How you are?")    In the sentence above, however, the word "how" is not an interrogative (question-word) but rather what is called a "relative adverb". It is not a question as such, but rather the person is sharing some factual information, namely "how he is getting to the party this evening".  Here are similar sentences with interrogatives (question-words) that function as relative adverbs or pronouns.  He told me what his name is. (Not: he told me what is his name) They asked me where I live (Not: they asked ...