A big THANK YOU to all who have responded to my message
concerning Prep + relative 'who'/'whom'.
To those who might wish to send further messages: Do not
send them to the Linguist List. They have not posted my
original message.
I just want to report -- very generally and without quoting
or mentioning names -- on some aspects pointed out in or
resulting from responses not addressed to the list:
- The range of reactions to the sentences from the BNC is
from something like 'I have never heard or read anything
similar' to 'I have heard many similar sentences'.
- Some informants do not find each of the sentences
equally good or bad; i.e. the reactions vary from sentence
to sentence. (Occasionally, one and the same speaker
changes their judgement on re-reading the sentences.)
- It was pointed out that there may be another kind of
error involved (apart from typos, printos, transcriptos),
namely editing errors, in which the proof reader rearranges
things and inadvertently generates new errors.
In addition, there are some very interesting and important
points of detail made both in the messages sent to the
list and to me personally.
For those who are interested I might sketch my search
procedure: I searched for the sequence
noun + preposition + <italic>who</italic> + anything but verb
in the complete BNC. This resulted in 266 sentences which
had to be filtered manually for the relevant cases. This
resulted in the eight sentences I gave you plus one more
which has an unmotivated comma after 'who' (which caused me
to think of typos etc., after I had realised that 'm' and
',' are next to each other on the keyboard (German
keyboards at least).