Re: Corpora: Query/Discussion: Prep+relative who
James L. Fidelholtz (jfidel@siu.buap.mx)
Thu, 1 Jul 1999 14:43:27 -0500 (CDT)
Dear Carsten and Al:
Now that I actually see the data, I have to say that I wouldn't
use those forms, but they almost sound better to me than the forms with
'whom', which I obviously don't use either, since I just postpose the
preposition (how's that for an oxymoron). I strongly suspect that this
sort of construction is similar to what we find in cases of real
language death: the grammar just goes all to hell, especially the
morphology, and I think this construction is in an advanced state of
near-death, and so perhaps the analogy holds (people with access to
megacorpora could check this out for frequency, which I bet is very
low). Of course, another possibility is that the construction has
already died (read: changed to the postposed version), and is just being
artificially kept 'alive' by the (pseudo-)'grammarians' who rail at
'ending sentences with prepositions', etc., in much the same way that
the change of various verb forms to 'ain't' has been kept by the
grammarians from going to completion for over 400 years already.
Jim
James L. Fidelholtz e-mail: jfidel@siu.buap.mx
Maestría en Ciencias del Lenguaje
Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades
Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, MÉXICO