“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.
Some related publications
- Iyeiri, Yoko, Michiko Yaguchi, and Hiroko Okabe. 2004. “To be different from or to be different than in Present-day American English: A Study of Style and Gender Differences Using the Corpus of Spoken Professional American-English”. English Today 20(3): 29-33.
- Iyeiri, Yoko, Michiko Yaguchi, & Hiroko Okabe. 2005. “Gender and Style: The Discourse Particle like in the Corpus of Spoken Professional American English”. English Corpus Studies 12: 37-51.
- Yaguchi, Michiko, Yoko Iyeiri, and Yasumasa Baba. 2010. “Speech Style and Gender Distinctions in the Use of very and real/really: An Analysis of the Corpus of Spoken Professional American English”. Journal of Pragmatics 42: 585-97.
- Iyeiri, Yoko, Michiko Yaguchi, and Yasumasa Baba. 2013. “Try to do and try and do Again: Verb Complementation in Spoken American English”. Kyoto Working Papers in English and General Linguistics 2: Special Issue in Honour of Professor Keinsei Sugayama on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday,ed. Michiko Yaguchi, Hiroyuki Takagi, Kairi Igarashi, Tsutomu Watanabe, Takafumi Maekawa, and Taiki Yoshimura, pp. 265-79, Tokyo: Kaitakusha.
- Iyeiri, Yoko, Michiko Yaguchi & Yasumasa Baba. “Negation and Speech Style in Professional American English”. Memoirs of the Faculty of Letters, Kyoto University 54: 181-204. (PDF)
