Es la cuñada de X... ¿De quién?

[Tin]

I know there are a lot of threads about "¿De quién?" already, but I can't find this. I want to know how you'd ask "¿De quién?" in colloquial American English, but I mean strictly this 2-word sentence, nothing else after it, no verb. And the situation would be: Speaker 2 can't hear well the end of Speaker 1's sentence. Example:

Speaker 1: Ella es la cuñada de (ininteligible)...
Speaker 2: ¿De quién?

My attempts:

Speaker 1: She's the sister-in-law of (unintelligible)...
Speaker 2: Of who/whom?

Speaker 1: She's the sister-in-law of (unintelligible)...
Speaker 2: Whose?



Is it correct to ask only using this one word: "Whose?"

 

[Raving Syntactivist]

This is a good question. I think it would depend on how the initial sentence was phrased. If it was phrased exactly like you have it ("she's the sister-in-law of ----"), then I think the question would have to be "Of whom?". But remember that we rarely phrase possessives like this in English, we would usually say "She's ------'s sister-in-law," in which case you would almost have to use "Whose?" although I think the more common thing would be to repeat the thing being possessed as well (in this case, the sister-in-law), making your most likely answer "Whose sister-in-law (is she)?". I hope that answers your question?

 

[Amapolas]

This is a good question. I think it would depend on how the initial sentence was phrased. If it was phrased exactly like you have it ("she's the sister-in-law of ----"), then I think the question would have to be "Of whom?". But remember that we rarely phrase possessives like this in English, we would usually say "She's ------'s sister-in-law," in which case you would almost have to use "Whose?" although I think the more common thing would be to repeat the thing being possessed as well (in this case, the sister-in-law), making your most likely answer "Whose sister-in-law (is she)?". I hope that answers your question?

Estoy de acuerdo. "Whose" está mejor, pero no la usaría así solita, sino repitiendo sister-in-law. Si no, queda como descolgado.