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(First let me clearly mention that I am from a non–English-speaking country, so I may be wrong with my question.)

My brother encountered a question on his English test:

It is useless to me who ___ ill.

The options were am/is/are and he answered is — which is correct as far as I am aware. (It can be are, too, in other situations.)

But according to the teacher the right answer should be am. I have no idea how it can ever be am. He said that it was related to the relative-pronoun antecedent. I don't know much about it.

I'm asking what the correct answer really is, and if the right answer really is am, then for the explanation why it is correct, preferably with links to authoritative sources about these strange types of usage.

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    I have no idea how that can be either- which is to say, I think your teacher is wrong.
    – Jim
    Commented Jul 2, 2022 at 4:28
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    No reasonable UK or US English test would contain this question. "It is useless to me who ___ ill" violates Orwell's Sixth Law (Don't say anything outlandish, no matter how correct the grammar).
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Jul 2, 2022 at 11:32
  • The question that was chosen as the original has.... yes....a non-answer. An answer with only two upvotes because it focuses its attention on Google ngrams, the false positives of me who am and in cases where writers have obviously preferred me who is. I much prefer the following english.stackexchange.com/questions/28662/… which has numerous answers all of whom, ironically, seemingly supportive of "me who am".
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Jul 4, 2022 at 6:00

2 Answers 2

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It is useless to me who is ill.

In relative clauses "who" is normally construed according as its antecedent, for example It is I who am ill, where the relative pronoun is construed as 1st person singular by virtue of its anaphoric relation to "I".

But here the antecedent of "who" is in accusative case and the 1st person property of "me" is not carried over to "who", which therefore takes on the default 3rd person feature.

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    Normally the case of the antecedent is irrelevant to the behavior of the words in the relative clause. Can you provide a source for this rule?
    – siride
    Commented Jul 2, 2022 at 17:30
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None of the above; the sentence is incorrectly structured.

As a native English speaker, I would say that the structure of the sentence is incorrect. "It is useless to me" works on its own, and it means "the object has no value to me", but it doesn't work when you append "who ____ ill" on the end of it - you're now going from talking about objects to talking about people. If "it" is intended to be "the knowledge of who is ill", you'd need say something like "Knowing who is ill is useless to me."

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  • Surely the sense is 'to me, the person who is ill'?
    – Kate Bunting
    Commented Jul 2, 2022 at 7:19
  • @KateBunting Then it's still incorrectly structured, because it needs a comma.
    – nick012000
    Commented Jul 2, 2022 at 8:08
  • Hey Nick, that is a huge font. Usually people like to appear a bit more humble here.
    – aparente001
    Commented Jul 3, 2022 at 1:52
  • @aparente001 It's a standard heading tag. It's more accessible than bolding your headings is for people with screen readers.
    – nick012000
    Commented Jul 3, 2022 at 21:02
  • Good to know. Still, I would add one or two hash symbols to make it more reasonably sized. It just feels so in your face.
    – aparente001
    Commented Jul 4, 2022 at 1:16

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