Timeline for How do I choose between ‘who’ or ‘whom’ when the subject pronoun is unclear?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 25, 2017 at 11:46 | comment | added | Mari-Lou A | OK, that makes sense. | |
| Jul 25, 2017 at 11:22 | comment | added | English Student | @Mari-lou A the main reason is that the excellent feedback of Janus Bahs Jacquet, MAA and John Lawler goes in more or less the same direction, which is a good approach that involves 'finding the gap' and substituting the pronoun to see if it is a subject pronoun or an object pronoun -- whereas my answer follows a very different logic of analysing the verb itself to see if it is transitive or intransitive or a linking verb -- so I did learn much from their answers but do not really see a way to use that to improve my own answer. However their approach now seems a better option for the Learner! | |
| Jul 25, 2017 at 7:44 | comment | added | Mari-Lou A | I thought the primary aim of the bounty was to see whether your solution stood up to the test. But despite getting some impressive, and authoritative feedback from users, you haven't "improved" (edited) your answer. Why is that? | |
| Jul 19, 2017 at 9:17 | comment | added | English Student | @Ben says no to Politics very true; and I use 'who' and 'whom' more or less correctly without thinking about it or applying any test or rule: but in many other cases, people like my friend, who are actually 'learners' if you consider their English expertise, find themselves in positions where their supervisors expect perfect grammar as in an 'advanced English' situation. | |
| Jul 19, 2017 at 9:11 | comment | added | Ben | The rule for learners is simple: Just use "who". Nobody will care. Use of "whom" should be considered advanced, not to be contemplated until you can curse idiomatically. :-) | |
| Jul 19, 2017 at 9:02 | comment | added | English Student | @Ben says No to Politics very perceptive comment! Yes indeed everything lies in decoding the sentence. Which is why I need a simple method that learners can use for this purpose. | |
| Jul 19, 2017 at 9:00 | comment | added | English Student | @Janus Bahs Jacquet many thanks for the detailed and constructive feedback, which was the main intention of posting this Q and A : somebody told me that both 'who' and 'whom' could be used with 'they believe they saw these men...' based on different lines of reasoning, so this sentence (which I am retaining as such for the moment) serves to emphasise the complexity and ambiguity of the who/whom rule for English learners. | |
| Jul 19, 2017 at 8:57 | comment | added | Ben | The substitution rule works fine, the difficulty is in decoding the sentence, not in the rule. | |
| Jul 19, 2017 at 8:56 | comment | added | Ben | "I believe he did this" -> "You believe who did this?" -> "Who do you believe did this?". On the other hand, "I believe him to have done this" -> "You believe whom to have done this?" -> "Whom do you believe to have done this?". | |
| Jul 19, 2017 at 8:48 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | This is all a part of what is known as wh-movement, the function by which elements within a clause are moved to a different position either in the same clause or in a containing clause. In English, wh-fronting is the most common movement of this type, with a pronoun representing the element ending up at the head of whatever clause it ends up in. | |
| Jul 19, 2017 at 8:38 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | Note that this is actually precisely the same, structurally speaking, as the version without saw: “These are the men who they believe robbed the bank” → “They believe they robbed the bank” (subject, who). The relative pronoun who here is also extracted from within the embedded clause (that) they robbed the bank. It can get quite hard to keep track of with very complex sentences, but the choice of who(m) always depends on the function of the referent in the underlying clause. | |
| Jul 19, 2017 at 8:35 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | The part about adding in saw is not correct: it should be whom in that sentence: “These are the men whom they believe they saw rob the bank”. If you transform it into a main clause, you get “They believe they saw them rob the bank”, which has an object pronoun. When the whole sentence is turned into a relative clause, that object pronoun is extracted from its position within the embedded clause and placed at the head of the entire relative clause—but it retains its original function and underlying location. | |
| Jul 19, 2017 at 8:30 | history | answered | English Student | CC BY-SA 3.0 |