I would appreciate your help phrasing the following:
I am looking for elements which/whose/... size/sizes is/are relatively large.
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4As a native speaker, I'm pretty sure I have never encountered sentences of the form "the car which door got scratched". Can you dig up any links or references where you saw this?– user1635Jan 18, 2011 at 15:09
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2@Rahul: I concur with this. "Whose" is correct here.– NoldorinJan 18, 2011 at 15:32
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2Perhaps those who recommended "which" actually meant "of which", which is an acceptable alternative to "whose".– Cerberus - Reinstate MonicaJan 18, 2011 at 21:03
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1@Cerberus perhaps that's why people confuse them, but it's not always a drop-in replacement and sometimes requires a change in the word order.– RomanStJan 19, 2011 at 0:37
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4@Cerberus: I agree. There is an old, dead superstition about using "whose" for animate objects and "of which" for inanimate objects. Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage quotes an American grammarian who said, "Grammarians would perhaps differ less, if they read more." :-)– TragicomicJan 19, 2011 at 9:23
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4 Answers
Whose is the way to go here. Merriam-Webster defines it as follows:
of or relating to whom or which especially as possessor or possessors
Which wouldn't work, because it doesn't indicate possession. It would work, however, if the phrase read:
I am looking for elements which are relatively large (in size).
As to the "size is" vs "sizes are", I would say that both are grammatically correct, though the singular is preferred. The Google stats look as follows:
- "are * whose sizes are" — 94,700
- "are * whose size is" — 1,020,000
Searching the British National Corpus returns four results for "whose size is" (one of which is actually used with a plural noun, "segments whose size is"), but none for "whose sizes are".
answered Oct 13, 2010 at 10:08
Indeed, whose is the (only) correct possessive form, for both animate (sentient) and inanimate objects.
The Wikipedia page supports this.
In addition, the possessive version of the non-sentient pronouns is the same as that of who: whose takes this role for all of them. E.g., "I will have to fix the car whose engine I ruined".
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Glad to help. And yeah, there is definitely some wrong information out there about the subject. (I was always taught to use whose in all cases, thankfully.)– NoldorinJan 18, 2011 at 15:59
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@romkyns: Yes, I don't often use the word "wrong" in reference to language, but that post you referenced is plain wrong. Jan 18, 2011 at 18:05
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I'm debating (with myself, natch) if I should -1 for making Wikipedia sound authoritative. ;-) Jan 18, 2011 at 21:06
The word you need is whose.
Using "whose" in such cases is correct. This thread over at the Daily Writing Tips forum addresses your question: Possessive form of "which".
