Re: Corpora: Query/Discussion: Prep+relative who
Dan I. SLOBIN (slobin@cogsci.Berkeley.EDU)
Thu, 1 Jul 1999 16:58:10 -0700 (PDT)
I'm quite confident that the examples with PREP+who are genuine, and not
transcription errors. At least in American English, "whom" seems to be
non-existent in spoken registers--probably entirely absent for speakers
younger than middle-age, and marginal in older speakers. I don't think my
students know the difference between "who" and "whom." And there are
strange overcorrections--for example, a formal academic letter from a
colleague in his 50s, using "whom" as sentence subject (probably because
it sounds archaic). In Sapir's famous discussion of "whom" in 1921 (his
chapter on drift, in Language), he said: "We may venture to surmise
that..._whom_ will ultimately disappear from English speech." He
predicted: "It is safe to prophesy that within a couple of hundred
years from to-day not even the most learned jurist will be saying `Whom
did you see?'" It took less than a half-century for that form to
disappear, and the PREP+whom form seems to be its way out too.
Dan I. Slobin
Dept of Psychology
University of California, Berkeley