Dan I. SLOBIN wrote:
> 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