Breakdown of El señor no nos explicó dónde conectar la motosierra.
no
no, not
el señor
Mr. / sir / gentleman
dónde
where
explicar
to explain
nos
to us
la
the (feminine)
conectar
to connect
la motosierra
the chainsaw
Questions & Answers about El señor no nos explicó dónde conectar la motosierra.
How does dónde conectar tie into our current practice with interrogatives?
While you've been practicing qué tan for degree, this sentence uses a simple interrogative pronoun (dónde) followed by an infinitive. Just like with qué or cuándo, when you want to say where or when 'to do' something, you place the infinitive directly after the interrogative word without any extra prepositions.
Why does dónde keep its accent mark here if the sentence isn't a direct question?
Interrogative words always keep their accents in indirect questions. Even though there are no question marks, dónde still represents an unknown 'where' rather than pointing to a known relative location (like 'the place where'), so it requires the accent.
Could the indirect object pronoun nos be attached to the end of the infinitive conectar instead?
Why is motosierra feminine (la) if it is related to the word moto?
Motosierra is a compound word formed by moto (motor) and sierra (saw). In compound words that combine two nouns, the gender is usually determined by the core object being described. Since it is fundamentally a type of saw, it takes the feminine gender of la sierra.
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