Show it to me. vs. Show me it. (2025)

Show it to me. vs. Show me it.

In another thread native speakers said that "Give it to me." worked, but "Give me it." didn't. They added "Give me that." worked, though.
How about "Show me it"? This English coursebook says it works. Do you agree?

Only ditransitive verbs can be used either way.

give/hand/pass/tell/ask/show somebody something (indirect object then direct object)
give/hand/pass/tell/ask/show something to somebody

Of the similar verbs that are

ditransitive, the one most misused on this forum is probably explain (can you explain me why…? ).

But to answer your question, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with any version using only pronouns, such as “Give me it”.

Not all English-speaking people find this construction acceptable (as you've seen yourself). Here's what the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddleston & Pullum, 2002, p.309–10) has to say (the % symbol indicates that an utterance is grammatical in some dialects only):

With verbs allowing an alternation between ditransitive and prepositional constructions, the difference between them is very largely a matter of information packaging. Thus in accordance with the general tendencies described in Ch. 16, §2, He gave his son a couple of CDs is likely to be preferred over the prepositional counterpart He gave a couple of CDs to his son, and conversely He gave the spare copy to one of his colleagues is likely to be preferred over the ditransitive counterpart He gave one of his colleagues the spare copy. If the direct object is a personal pronoun, the prepositional construction is favoured, especially if the other NP is not a pronoun – examples like %I gave Kim it are inadmissible for most speakers, especially in AmE.​

Therefore there is something intrinsically weird about personal pronouns here in general (it's to do with stress and length, I believe). They can still be heard in short phrases like "Give me it" (often "Gimme it"); the Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English by Bieber et al. says on p.423 this pattern occurs almost exclusively in conversation. Unstressed personal pronouns are ungrammatical after particles in constructions like "I brought in them" (while "I brought them in", "I brought in the chairs", and "I brought the chairs in" work; also compare this with the grammatical "She jumped off it", which contains a transitive preposition).

abluter said:

"Give it me" is perhaps more often heard than "Give me it", but the latter would be used if you wanted to emphasize the "me".
As in: "Whom shall I give it to - Mary, uncle Fred or you?" "Give me it".

Click to expand...

And how about "show"? Does either work for you?

A: What is that?
B: My new mp4 player.
A: Show me it.
A: Show it to me.

There's no such thing as wrong in grammar; it's rather about whether a construction occurs or doesn't occur (and therefore whether speakers of these dialects consider such constructions acceptable). "Give it me", "Give me it", "Show it me", "Show me it", and so on, are strictly dialectal (grammatical in certain dialects of English such as BrE, most notably in Northern England). For constructions such as "Give it me", LSGSWE says it "occurs in conversation and fiction, but is relatively rare in both".

These constructions are at best marginal in Standard English.

zaffy said:

And how about "show"? Does either work for you?

A: What is that?
B: My new mp4 player.
A: Show me it.
A: Show it to me.

Click to expand...

Yes, I've hard and seen both of those. I've also come across "Show it me" but I wouldn't recommend that for anything that's going to be marked such as a test or exam.