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Does "whose" correlate with a noun or a possesive determiner? For example:

"Whose dog is that?" "That's Johnny's dog."

This would imply that "whose" correlates with "Johnny's" or that "whose dog" correlates with "Johnny's dog". This makes intuitive sense, as they serve the same syntactical function. Yet, the following noun phrase can be made:

"Johnny, whose dog was hungry."

If this is grammatically correct, it would imply that "whose" correlates with a noun. It would thus seem that this construction is incorrect, yet it has become so generally accepted that no one bats an eye.

Thoughts?

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    This is perfectly grammatical, and has always been, in all Germanic languages. Edit: come to think of it, it's grammatical in all Indo-European languages. Slavic, Romance, you name it.
    – RegDwigнt
    Commented Mar 18, 2016 at 22:15
  • Relative pronouns correlate in animacy (animate: who, whom, whose, that; inanimate: which, that), but not in case. Compare the sentence This man (subject), whom (object) I met last night, is an artist.
    – Anonym
    Commented Mar 21, 2016 at 2:02

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You are comparing two different uses of whose.

In Whose dog is that?, whose is an interrogative pronoun.

In Johnny, whose dog was hungry, whose is being used as a relative pronoun.

In the case of the interrogative there is a direct matching of the pronoun with the proper name in the reply.

There is no similar matching with relative pronouns which simply provide explanation. The house which was on fire. The doctor whose wife is ill.

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  • Exactly. It's accepted. But every other relative pronoun parallels its syntax with what it relates to. Is whose just an exception?
    – Jerry
    Commented Mar 18, 2016 at 22:54
  • Whose is genitive, parallel with his, my etc.
    – Colin Fine
    Commented Mar 18, 2016 at 23:51
  • What I mean is, when used in a subordinate relative clause, it doesn't parallel another genitive.
    – Jerry
    Commented Mar 19, 2016 at 0:30
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    In Whose dog is that?, the pronoun "whose" is interrogative determiner.
    – BillJ
    Commented Mar 19, 2016 at 8:52

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