Whisper someone vs. whisper to someone

Question

Are both of these sentences grammatically correct:

1) She whispered me "yes".

2) She whispered to me "yes".

I read about dative shifts but I'm not sure if I understood correctly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dative_shift

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

harrison811) She whispered me "yes".

No.

harrison812) She whispered to me "yes".

Yes, with a a capital "Y" and a comma after the dialogue tag.

harrison81I read about dative shifts but I'm not sure if I understood correctly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dative_shift

I am a long-time native speaker of US English. I never took Latin. I and others like me, and there are more of us than of those who know what "dative" means, don't know what "dative" means, but we do know when something sounds unidiomatic. Your sentence does not seem to be the same case as the one in Wikipedia. You have a dialogue tag, and the quoted material stands outside the grammar, to my mind. The quoted material is not a grammatical object. Bear in mind that English grammar is descriptive, and there will be many theories about the grammar of your sentence in addition to my half-baked one. Grammar will only get you so far in forming correct sentences.

Verbs like "whispered", "said" and "shouted" take a prepositional phrase (or no phrase) denoting the target. To my mind, no quotations marks should be used if you do it that way: "She whispered yes to me."

Whisper someone vs. whisper to someone

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