ISOC, ESOC
A while back I
posted
about two cases where the pronoun
whom
is often used for the subject of a clause (against the prescription
that
who should be used for
subjects) and there's some structural motivation for choosing
whom. These I labeled ISOC
(for "in-situ subject of an object clause") and ESOC (for "extracted
subject of an object clause") -- hang on, I'll explain these -- which
immediately suggested Shadrach and Meschach in the fiery furnace,
although I have no good candidate for the Abednego character.
I suggested at the time that some people might have adopted ISOC or
ESOC or both as part of a (non-standard) system for assigning case to
the pronoun
WHO. Now I've collected some evidence
in favor of this idea.
First ISOC, as in
(1) Extra copies will be provided for
whomever needs them.
As I said in my earlier posting, here
we have an object clause (usually the
object of a P) with WHO as its subject. The
pronoun then immediately follows the governor, and could easily be
mistaken for its object (even though it's the whole clause that's the
object).
So the pronoun picks up its case from its location, rather than from
its syntactic function within its clause.
Sentence (1) is adapted from an example in a 1981 article by Maxine
Hairston in
College English
(43.8.794-806): "Not all errors are created equal: Nonacademic readers
in the professions respond to lapses in usage". Hairston reported
on a study in which she mailed 101 professionals (none of them English
teachers) a questionnaire of 65 items, each including "one error in
standard English usage", asking them to choose one of three responses
for each item: "Does not bother me; Bothers me a little; Bothers me a
lot." She got 84 questionnaires back, and grouped the items into
six levels according to the ratings on the returned questionnaires:
"Outrageous, Very Serious, Serious, Moderately Serious, Minor, or
Unimportant".
Notice that I said that the ISOC example (1) above was "adapted from"
one of Hairston's -- the only item on the questionnaire testing case
choice for
WHO. In fact, the item (Hairston's #1)
on the questionnaire was not (1), but
(1') Extra copies will be provided for
whoever needs them.
Wonderful. Hairston was assuming that the ISOC version is the
correct one; indeed, she says that the problem with (1') is "using
'whoever' in a sentence that called for 'whomever'" (p. 797). Her
respondents rated this sentence as only a Minor error -- quite possibly
because they saw no error in it at all (even though they were told that
each sentence contained one error in the "conventions of grammar"), or
because they had a twinge about the passive, or thought
extra (rather than
additional) might be a tad
colloquial, or whatever. We'll never know: Hairston didn't have
access to the respondents' reasons for their ratings, and we can't even
ask her for her opinions, since she died two years ago.
But we do have access to Hairston's opinions about ISOC.
Twenty-five years ago, this highly respected professor of English at
the University of Texas was in favor of it. I very much doubt she
was alone in this view. So, ISOC lives.
On to ESOC. As with ISOC, as I said in my earlier posting,
there's an object clause, but this time
its subject has been extracted and now appears at the front of a higher
clause. Still, the gap of extraction immediately follows the
governor (most often, a V)...
The gap can then be assigned accusative case (by position rather than
syntactic function within its clause), and if this case is inherited by
the extracted element, we get
whom.
Here's Roy Blount, Jr. complaining about ESOC, also 25 years ago:
... the most prevalent who/whom mistake -- you see it even
in the Times -- is the undue whom, as in, "The Pope listed all
those whom
he felt would rise from the dead."
In the notation from the earlier posting (with clause boundaries
indicated by bracketing, with the extracted element bold-faced, and
with the gap of extraction marked by underlining):
The Pope listed all those [ whom
he felt [ ___ would rise from the dead ] ]
Blount is known primarily as a humorist, but much of what he writes can
be fairly characterized as light essays, often on serious
subjects. His reflection on
whom
comes (on p. 85) from "Is the Pope capitalized?", a review of four
style guides for journalists reprinted in his 1982 collection
One Fell Soup: Or, I'm Just a Bug on the
Windshield of Life (Penguin paperback).
It's not just the
New York Times.
Reader Chris Lance, who finds ESOC jarring and tends to notice it,
blogged
in
his journal about two examples in Colm Tóibín's
The Master and five in Iain Pears's
An Instance of the Fingerpost,
all in relative clauses. From
The
Master:
He sent his book on the matter to those
in England [ whom he thought [
___ might initiate a debate ] ]. (p. 79)
... people [ whom I don't
think [ ___ ever knew Constance ] ] claim to miss her." (p. 197)
From
Fingerpost (supplied to
me by Lance in e-mail), in the U.K. Vintage paperback edition:
She had killed a man [ whom she said [ ___ had raped her ]
], but the jury judged this a lie because she had fallen pregnant,
which cannot occur without the woman taking pleasure in the act. (p.
147)
I also learned from the keeper that Lord Mordaunt — [ whom I discovered [ ___ was bitterly
detested in the town for his lack of extravagance ] ] — was indeed in
residence as warden of the castle ... (p. 222)
Grove is pressing his case and is winning over several members of the
Fellowship [ whom I assumed [
___ were on my side ] ]. (p. 243)
The man then pointed out a beggar on the street outside, [ [ whom he said [ ___ was once a sailor
in a Candia ship ] ]. (p. 400)
... the Blundy girl ... spent much time travelling from Burford in the
west to Abingdon in the south, carrying messages to sectaries [ whom, he was sure, [ ___ would in
due course rise up as one when the murder of Clarendon had thrown the
country into turmoil ] ]. (p. 604)
I suspect that these are not inadvertent slips, or hypercorrections at
the moment of writing, but how the writers think case-marking of
WHO
works in object clauses in English. (As I said in my earlier
posting, there's a long history of such practices.) In fact, ISOC
and ESOC might now be the primary islands of whom use in modern written English,
outside of the mainland of P + whom
-- that is, object whom with
a fronted (rather than stranded) preposition, as in To whom did you give the book? and the student to whom I gave the book.
A final entertainment. Kenneth Ulrich reports in e-mail:
I live in Sweden, where business is
often conducted in English. Last year, I attended a presentation, held
by a Swede whose English was nearly flawless, on the things that
remained to be done in a certain project. Several of the speaker's
PowerPoint slides featured a table with two columns: "Action" (that is,
what needed doing) and "Who/Whom?".
I first thought, wildly, that I was witnessing an act of political
subversion--capitalist deeds formulated in Leninist terms--but then
realized that no one was being called upon to do anything *to* anyone
else. It finally dawned on me that the point was to include both
singular and plural doers: "who" meant one person (corresponding to the
Swedish "vem"), and "whom" a group (Swedish "vilka").
Variation in
who/whom use in
English must be troublesome for speakers of other languages. I
can certainly see that speakers of a language that marks number
differences on
WH pronouns would strive to find such a
distinction in English. Very clever, though just wrong.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at June 18, 2007 02:16 PM