Is "I am who(m) God made me" grammatical?

Question

SAH asked an interesting question about case, I am [who/whom] G-d made me, but one issue that came up in the comments repeatedly is that many people said that they find the example sentence unacceptable with either pronoun.

This suggests that the sentence could be ungrammatical, but I'm having trouble figuring out why it would be. It is possible in general for the verb "make" to take a direct object and an object complement. The object complement can be an adjective, as in "They made me unhappy", or a noun phrase, as in "It made me a believer". We can say "It made me who I am", and things like "Your personality is what makes you you" or "These are the things that made me, me" (people seem to vary in how they punctuate sentences like these, but it's not that hard to find examples).

One thing I considered was that maybe it is grammatical, but hard to parse because it is a kind of "garden path sentence": many of the commenters expressed the idea that having both "who(m)" and "me" is redundant, which to me seems like a misunderstanding of the syntax of the sentence.

For example, Mitch said:

• The relative pronoun should replace the subject or object in the relative clause but both are still there. It would be "I am who/whom G-d made" or "I am who made me".(who or whom both work; whom is hardly used at all in normal speech nowadays, but religious speech holds on to some archaism me like 'whom'.

  [...] "X is who Y made Z" not grammatical. "Adjective is how Y made Z" grammatical (from "Y made Z Adjective") "X is who/whom Y loves" (from "Y loves X")

If the sentence is actually ungrammatical, and not just difficult to parse, it would seem to indicate some restriction on the ability of who or whom in this position to correspond to anything but a subject or direct object. I wonder if this is related to the dubious acceptability of "who(m)" in contexts like "the girl whom I gave the ring" (where many speakers feel a "to" has to be added to complete the sentence).

Surprisingly to me, it seems like there may be a difference between the animate wh-pronoun who(m) and the inanimate wh-pronoun what, since I received comments suggesting that similar sentences with what do sound acceptable to Araucaria and Mitch:

• "What they named Christopher was the boy" doesn't seem to bear a good relation to the original, it seems to me . "What they named the boy was Christopher" seems ok to me ... (but grammaticality is in the ear of the beholder, no doubt!) – Araucaria

• "What they named the boy was Christopher." sounds fine to me. Also "Christopher was what they named the boy" is fine too. – Mitch

In "Christopher was what they named the boy", the word "what" doesn't seem to be either a subject or a direct object, but nevertheless the sentence appears to be grammatical. So what's the relevant difference between this sentence and "I am who(m) G-d made me"?

I'm interested in knowing if there are any grammatical theories that explain why who(m) would be ungrammatical in this context, but any evidence (in addition to the already-established unacceptability judgements of a fair number of commenters here) that you can provide showing that the sentence with who(m) is ungrammatical would suffice as an answer to this question. (Or if you can show that the sentence is grammatical, that would also make a great answer!)

Answer 1

It's grammatical. As per my answer at SAH's question, it's grammaticality is flushed out when one adds what has been (or can be taken to have been) elided, so:

I am who/m God made me to be.

For which I vote for who based on "it sounds better" (the be-all-and-end-all of descriptive linguistics).

Thus

I am who God made me (to be)

is grammatical...

as is the reordered

I am who God made me.

Answer 2

The reason is that traditionally, you can't use who in fused relative clauses; that is, you cannot use who when it figures in two clauses, being the subject (object) of one and the subject (object) of another.

Shakespeare used fused relative clauses:

who steals my purse steals trash.

And they seem to be coming back into use in English today:

I can help who's next.

(Although some people say that this is ungrammatical.)

But traditionally , you can't use who as the pronoun for two overlapping clauses, even though you can use whoever, whatever, or what.

I will do what is right.

There is a good discussion of this on this LanguageLog post, which says much more about it in greater depth than I could.

Answer 3

My theory is that the "who" version is rejected by some because they have adopted a "fix-up" rule to satisfy prescriptive grammarians which says: Use relative "who" only when it is the subject of the relative clause -- otherwise use "whom". That often works okay to produce the archaic supposedly correct "whom" forms. It doesn't work here, since "whom" is ungrammatical, so there is no solution for this example. It's all bad. (I don't use "whom" ever, so "who" is okay with me.)

Answer 4

I am whom God made.

I am who God made.

The first is indubitably correct, but unfortunately suggests that God just made this one person, and that you are it (cf. "I am whom God sent" - only angels and Jesus and perhaps a prophet or two can make this claim). The second can be read as elliptical for "I am (such) as God made me" which is what is meant, and how you should say it if you wish to sound natural.