“Relative and Interrogative who/whom in Contemporary Professional American English”

Bibliographical details

Iyeiri, Yoko & Michiko Yaguchi. 2009. “Relative and Interrogative who/whom in Contemporary Professional American English”, in Germanic Languages and Linguistic Universals, ed. John Ole Askedal, Ian Roberts, Tomonori Matsushita & Hiroshi Hasegawa, pp. 177-91. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Who encroaching on the domain of whom

This paper discusses the relative and interrogative uses of who and whom in contemporary English on the basis of the Corpus of Spoken Professional English. As expected, the use of who is expanding in the domain whom in today’s English, and this is the case both in the interrogative and relative uses, though the shift seems to be a little faster in the former than in the latter. The present paper discusses the variation between who and whom in three different syntactic environments and concludes “Whom is best preserved immediately after prepositions, while who is almost regular in the case of preposition stranding. Furthermore, there is a more flexible variability between who and whom when the relevant item occurs as the object of a verb without preposition” (p. 189) The analysis of this study is in principle corpus-based, while it draws on questionnaire-based views on the usage shown in previous studies.