Sometimes I worry that I’m not properly using this blog as a chance to get the word out about linguistics, so to rest my troubled mind, let’s talk a little about a component of syntactic theory: case. (Please stop clicking on the nearest link in an attempt to escape.) If you’ve never heard of case, here’s a quick overview. Syntactic theory dictates that all noun phrases must be assigned a case in order to be grammatical. This requirement is called the Case Filter. The Case Filter explains why (1a) is grammatical but (1b) is not; an inflected verb like ate can supply case to its subject (the man), but the uninflected infinitive to eat can’t supply case to its subject. As a result, the man is not assigned case in (1b), breaking the Case Filter and resulting in an ill-formed sentence. We can remedy this situation, as in (1c), where told supplies case for the man, satisfying the Case Filter and fixing the sentence.
(1a) The man ate seven sour cream donuts.
(1b) *The man to eat seven sour cream donuts.
(1c) I told the man to eat seven sour cream donuts.
In an attempt to build suspense, I’ve so far avoided saying what exactly this “case” thing is that’s being assigned. Roughly, case is a marker on a noun phrase (NP) that indicates what the NP’s role is in the sentence. English only has three morphological cases: the nominative (or subjective), accusative (or objective), and genitive (or possessive) cases. I’m going to overlook possessive case in this post, because it’s not relevant to the final point and is rather different from the other two cases. Nominative case is used to mark a subject, while accusative marks an object. These two cases are only apparent in pronouns. The nominative forms of the personal pronouns are I, you, he, she, it, we, they, while the accusative forms are me, you, him, her, it, us, them. (2a) is correct because the subject is in the nominative case and the object is in the accusative. (2b) is incorrect because the cases are swapped.
(2a) I saw him.
(2b) *Me saw he.
(2c) The octopus ate the cuttlefish.
(2d) The cuttlefish ate the octopus.
Note that (2c) & (2d) are both correct because non-pronominal NPs are “zero-marked” in English. That means that they don’t exhibit any outward marking of their cases; a nominative non-pronominal NP looks the same as the accusative non-pronominal NP. Zero-marking appears in some other places in English: the plural of sheep is sheep, and the conjugated verb eat in I eat fish is indistinguishable from the uninflected infinitival form in I want to eat fish.
Because only the pronouns have apparent case markings, English is often said to have an “impoverished” case system. Compared to a Finno-Ugric language like Estonian or Hungarian, which has tons of cases with exotic names like the inessive, superessive, ablative, translative, and exessive, English seems as poor as a pauper on payday. And what’s worse is that English has been steadily reducing its case markings. Back in Old English, not only were all nouns marked for nominative and accusative cases, but also dative and instrumental cases.
Why has English shed so much of its case system? Well, quite simply, it got outsourced. Prepositional phrases took over the roles of morphological case marking for most of the oblique cases, like dative and instrumental. That’s why we now say that Vikings lived by the sword instead of lifde sweorde — the instrumental changed from an -e suffix on the noun to the prepositions with and by. The English equivalents of those exotic Finno-Ugric cases are mostly recreated through humble prepositions. As for the structural cases (nominative and accusative), the modern (relatively) fixed word order has rendered them obsolete. Outside of poetic writing and certain syntactic alternations like topicalization, the word order of Modern English is Subject-Verb-Object. As a result, the structural cases are redundant and their markings have just fallen out of the language.
But not entirely! Pronouns have zealously retained their case markings through hell and high water. Except, of course, for whom, which has been losing its grip on that accusative -m for some time. And this, at long last, brings us to the whole point of this post. Reading through a column about hypercorrection by Paul Mulshine, I was struck by one supposed example of hypercorrection, the use of whomever for whoever:
(3) Whomever the Republicans nominate should assume he must replace Iowa’s seven electoral votes …
(3) comes from the pen of George Will, who Mulshine claims has engaged in a spot of hypercorrection; according to Mulshine, whomever ought to be whoever. Mulshine asserts that “‘Whomever’ may sound more impressive to the unlettered, but it cannot serve as the subject of a sentence.” But whomever isn’t the subject of (3). The subject is the whole phrase whomever the Republicans nominate. And this is where case assignment gets really tricky, because we start to get a conflict.
Obviously, subjects get assigned nominative case; that’s why I love you is sweet and Me love you is stupid. But the subject in this sentence is actually a whole clause — a “sentential subject”, as it’s known in the biz. Semantically, who(m)ever is the head of the sentential subject, so you might well expect the nominative case to manifest itself on who(m)ever, yielding an m-less whoever. I imagine this is Mulshine’s train of thought here. But within the sentential subject, who(m)ever is the object! It has moved from the object position to the front of the clause, but if the embedded question were answered, we’d have “The Republicans nominate McCain”, with McCain, the object, replacing who(m)ever.* Therefore, who(m)ever ought to get accusative case, yielding whomever. And so it seems that who(m)ever in (3) needs a Schrodinger’s m, an m that simultaneously exists to satisfy the accusative case and does not exist to satisfy the nominative case.
This dilemma ends up being resolved by arguing that the nominative case on the sentential subject doesn’t ever have to visibly manifest itself on an NP; it is an abstract case assigned to the whole sentential subject. That means that the nominative case never gets assigned to who(m)ever, and the problem clears right up, with George Will being technically correct to write whomever. But note that it took substantial analysis to realize that — certainly more than us case-deprived English speakers are prepared to do in fluent speech. Furthermore, note that this is such a weird situation that even native English speakers such as Mulshine will make mistakes on it. But more than anything else, note that it doesn’t matter. There is no ambiguity in the meaning of the sentence, no effect of omitting or including the m. That’s why case is falling out of the language; it just doesn’t do anything for us, and it can get really difficult to apply accurately. In my own speech and writing, I have an alternation between who and whom for the accusative case. I use whom in situations where it pleases my ears and I am confident in the accusative case assignment, and everywhere else I go with who. There are probably a lot of children who are being taught that who is the standard accusative form. I say good for them, and good for the language. It’s moving on.
—
*: If you’re having trouble with this part of the argument, think of the sentential subject as a question on its own: Whom did the Republicans nominate? Clearly in this question the Republicans is the subject and Whom is the object.
Motivated Grammar 
31 comments
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October 13, 2009 at 11:46 am
Ari
I thought that Shakira’s song was actually about this debate. On double checking her lyrics and research notes it’s actually whenever vs. whenever.
October 13, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Emily Michelle
I studied both linguistics and editing, and the linguistics side of me says “You’re out of here, whom!” but the editor in my heart will be very sad to see it go. Great post, though. I actually had a debate about this with someone recently; I should send them to this blog.
October 13, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Jonathan
Fun stuff.
Is the “us” in “certainly more than us case-deprived English speakers are prepared to do in fluent speech” a sly joke, or is it an error?
October 13, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Tim
Jonathan: That caught my eye, as well. I’m assuming it was a joke, as I found it rather amusing. But I suppose it could have been an error.
October 14, 2009 at 9:35 am
Faldone
Actually, the m in whom is dative. In Latin it’s accusative but we’re speaking English here. The accusative, if it still existed, would be whon. This is a little breakfast experiment I suggest to folks who say that people who can’t get who/whom straight are ignorant or even stupid. Try to differentiate between the accusative and the dative. Is it
1a) Whom are we sending to Congress?
or
1b) Whon are we sending to Congress?
October 14, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Makri
No, the -m in whom isn’t dative. New English is far from having a dative case. Of course, you mean that is it an original dative, which is quite true, but original in this use is a non-intersective modifier, and therefore, your sentence isn’t true in the simple present.
Though arguably, it’s not accusative either, since the two cases of English pronouns don’t quite behave like nominative and accusative usually do.
October 14, 2009 at 11:14 pm
Sarah
This is cool :)
October 15, 2009 at 12:10 pm
The Ridger
For many speakers of English, “than” has been reanalyzed to work as prepositions do, so “than us” is always used.
Or, alternatively, for many speakers of English, “I” and other subject pronouns have been converted to clitics, and thus can’t stand alone but only work in conjoined phrases (thus “for Bob and I”) or with verbs (thus “Who wants lunch? – Me!/I do” but never “I!”, as well as “It’s me” instead of Chaucer’s elegant “It am I”…)
October 15, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Makri
“I” can be contrastively stressed. Not what you would expect from a proclitic… Also, “I’m” would be a bit funny then.
Besides, “for Bob and I” is argued by some linguists to be hypercorrection and possibly not really part of the grammar. Why on earth should the nominative/subject form show up in the complement of a preposition? In fact, some speakers would say “Bob and me” even as a subject, as far as I know.
But the “Me!” and “It’s me!” cases are exactly why some people think that English doesn’t really have nominative and that “I” is something really special.
The point about “than” being reanalyzed as a preposition, though, is very plausible. Incidentally, the same has happened to similar words for some speakers of German.
October 16, 2009 at 7:06 am
goofy
Object-position “X and I” cannot be due solely to hypercorrection, since it is attested as early as the 16th century.
October 16, 2009 at 7:08 am
goofy
“than” has been a preposition since the 16th century as well.
October 16, 2009 at 9:37 am
Philip
In his post, Gabe Doyle wrote: “In my own speech and writing, I have an alternation between who and whom for the accusative case. I use whom in situations where it pleases my ears and I am confident in the accusative case assignment, and everywhere else I go with who.”
In my speech and writing, alternation between who and whom is a matter of register. In formal social situations, I’ll use whom–but only if it’s marked by a preposition: “To whom do you wish to speak?” The rest of the time, it’s who.
Readers of this blog will, of course, understand that who/whom is redundant. It’s word order that tells us who is doing what to whom:
The boy xxxx kissed Mary blushed.
The boy xxxx Mary kissed blushed.
We know who’s doing the kissing and who’s getting kissed because of the word order in the relative clause.
It’s interesting that many standardized tests of English “grammar” still put an emphasis on this trivial–and non-necessary–historical relic.
Sorry for the topic shift, but here is my favorite pair of sentences that show how prepositions function as case markers in English:
John was hit by a meteorite.
John was hit with a meteorite.
October 17, 2009 at 1:45 am
mike
It bothers me slightly to use “accusative” as a synonym for “objective” (Gabe: “In my own speech and writing, I have an alternation between who and whom for the accusative case”) because, I suppose, of German training, where accusative indicates only direct objects, whereas “whom” can also represent the (historical) dative (e.g. “The boy whom I gave the gift.”) Given that “whom” can serve in any object capacity (d.o., i.o.), it seems more, um, encompassing to use “objective” as the term to contrast with “nominative.”
Unless I’m misunderstanding the usage here. In any event, point is that “accusative” does not cover all object-case scenarios. Sort of a tangent, I realize.
October 17, 2009 at 4:19 am
goofy
mike: “The boy whom I gave the gift.”
AIUI, this was the case in Old English, but as early as the 1300s, it would be replaced by “to whom”, cf this 1362 cite in the OED: “Tel me to whom þat Tresour appendeþ?” There’s no dative case here. Unless I’m misunderstanding something :)
October 17, 2009 at 10:27 am
mike
I don’t have my OE grammar here, but you’re saying that there’s no dative indirect object in Anglo-Saxon?
October 17, 2009 at 10:32 am
mike
In fact, arent’ there dative _direct_ objects in OE? (And other Germanic languages.)
October 17, 2009 at 2:59 pm
goofy
mike, I’m unsure about the difference you’re making between “indirect object” and “dative”. To me, “dative” would mean a morphological case distinct from accusative. You seem to be saying that “whom” can be the dative. But “whom” by itself isn’t the dative; “whom” is used with a preposition to express the indirect object. There is no dative case. Your example “the boy whom I gave the gift” is not part of my English.
So I don’t see the problem with calling “whom” accusative.
October 17, 2009 at 4:28 pm
mike
@goofy — accusative is the morphological form that in Germanic studies identifies the function of direct object; the morphological form for indirect objects (and certain other types of objects) is dative. We can agree that this is the case in general for German, Old English, etc., right?
As such, referring to “whom” as accusative suggests that it can act only as a direct object, which is not the case. (haha) The fact that the morphological form of “who” for accusative and dative is now the same is of course true. My point is that using the name of a morphological form that (in certain philological contexts) marks direct object to mean ANY objective form of “who” is, you know, confusing from that perspective, and it’s clearer to refer to it simply as objective, and why not, because it’s the same form for any object[ive] function anyway.
I don’t completely buy your notion that there is no dative use of whom (ie, without a preposition) in English. The sentence I propose is not ungrammatical, AFAIK. Not common, but not wrong … ?
October 17, 2009 at 9:16 pm
goofy
OK, mike, I see what you’re saying.
However, “the boy whom I gave the gift” is without a doubt ungrammatical for me.
October 19, 2009 at 8:54 am
Makri
That “the boy whom I gave the gift” is ungrammatical for anybody is highly surprising, because those indirect objects don’t behave any differently from direct objects. So I really don’t see why the sentence should be ungrammatical, though even I as a non-native speaker can recognize it as sounding uncommon. But it’s grammatical for me. (Not that you should give too much on L2 grammaticality judgments, even if they are, like this one, intuitive and not based on learning…)
Goofy, can you give us some constructions where “whom” is grammatical for you?
I can really make sense of your ungrammaticality judgment only as an aversion against the constructions excessive uncommonness (use of “whom” + overt relative pronoun in an object relative clause, which also seems to have become sort of uncommon)… Are “the boy to whom I gave the gift” and “the man whom I saw” really that much better for you? What about “the boy whom I helped”?
October 19, 2009 at 12:09 pm
Bill S.
I’ve seen a good many students have the same reaction to rel. clauses like “whom I gave the gift” that Goofy has — I’ll use the pattern in a class example and 20% of the students think it’s a mistake. They don’t have that reaction to “…whom I gave the gift to” or “…to whom I gave the gift.” What that might say about the relation between the “X gave Y Z” and “X gave Z to Y” constructions depends on what theory you’re using, but it’s interesting regardless.
October 19, 2009 at 12:37 pm
mike
Gabe, sorry to hijack your posting here. :-)
Now I’m wondering whether we can come up with dative, non-OP uses of “whom” that don’t sound as ungrammatical as “The boy whom I gave the gift.” Incidentally, I do not dispute at all that this is stilted. I agree that “whom” is essentially moribund in the vernacular and anyone who takes pains to use it conversationally is probably sending a meta-linguistic message. :-)
So …
Person 1: I have him the gift.
Person 2: You gave whom the gift?
What say ye?
October 19, 2009 at 7:44 pm
goofy
My judgment that it’s ungrammatical has nothing to do with “who/whom” I think. It’s because it’s “whom” and not “to whom”. I guess “X gave Y Z” can’t be relativized for me, while “X gave Z to Y” can.
I had no idea that this “Y whom X gave Z” construction was acceptable to some people.
These are all fine for me:
the boy to whom I gave the gift
the boy whom/who/that I gave the gift to
the man whom I saw
the boy whom I helped
mike wrote:
“Person 1: I gave him the gift.
Person 2: You gave whom the gift?”
That sounds fine! But is that “whom” a relative or an interrogative? I think it’s an interrogative.
October 19, 2009 at 8:01 pm
mike
>> But is that “whom” a relative or an interrogative? I think it’s an
>> interrogative.
Either way, it’s functionally dative. :-)
October 25, 2009 at 10:20 pm
Flesh-eating Dragon
I didn’t know such a word as “whomever” existed in any English dialect until I read about it on the Internet. For many of us, even when we do make a distinction between “who” and “whom”, that distinction is dropped when the suffix “ever” is applied. Whom + Ever = Whoever.
I always feel annoyed when people draw attention to the word, because it brings back the memory of an online grammar quiz I stumbled upon a few years ago. To quote what I said on this subject last time it cropped up on a blog comment thread:
The quiz boasted about how its authors were not prescriptivists and how its answers were all backed up with references to online dictionaries and so on, but on closer examination this turned out to be pure hypocrisy. It’s one thing to make silly claims about grammar, and another to back them up with references that don’t even say what you claim they say. In this case, the quiz had the audacity to claim that “whoever” is sometimes incorrect, but the references provided were only about who vs whom and didn’t even MENTION what happens if you stick “-ever” on the end. The quiz writers simply assumed that it doesn’t make any difference.
October 28, 2009 at 11:21 pm
Gabe
Jonathon/Tim/goofy/Ridger: It wasn’t a sly joke, regrettably. After spending the past few weeks thinking about it, I’ve decided that it is probably an error, although the point about “than” as a preposition is well-taken. I think I’ll leave it as-is as a subtle warning of the complications of case assignment.
mike/goofy/Makri/Bill/et al: Don’t worry in the least about hijacking any posts here. That was great fun to read through! I’ve a couple of thoughts. I agree that “objective” and “accusative” aren’t interchangeable, and that “objective” might be better for English “whom”; I prefer to use accusative because that’s what I learned originally, and because English is much more a nominative-accusative case assignment language than an ergative-absolutive one. I also agree that “the boy whom I gave the gift” is stilted, but interestingly “the boy who I gave the gift” sounds noticeably worse. Do you agree? Perhaps “whom” really can convey some sense of dative-ness that “who” can’t.
F-eD: Your story calls to mind something or other that I’ve since forgotten from semantics. Basically, there are different levels of specificity in wh-phrases, so “who” is less specific than “which doctor”, for instance. There was also something about “what” versus “what the hell”, such that certain questions were stilted with “what” but not with “what the hell”. The same thing is probably true of “who” and “whoever”, with one being less specific than the other and probably affecting the interpretability of sentences. This was probably not a helpful comment since it was so vague, but in summary, I agree with you.
November 1, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Makri
What about “the boy I gave the gift”, though? I wonder whether the problem with relativizing the “indirect” object arises only with overt relative pronouns…
November 19, 2009 at 12:26 am
John Cowan
It’s undoubtedly true that in the English pronoun system, historic accusative forms were lost and replaced by historic dative forms, but that does not mean that synchronically considered they are datives today.
November 19, 2009 at 7:18 am
goofy
>>I also agree that “the boy whom I gave the gift” is stilted, but interestingly
>>“the boy who I gave the gift” sounds noticeably worse. Do you agree?
No. :)
March 5, 2010 at 1:04 pm
David Teague
I’m new. I wonder where the appropriate place to inquire about the this usage: “… for John and I…” An acquaintance mine, an of English lady (over 50, with what seemed to be a proper education), claimed she had been taught that “me” should be used if one says,”… for me…” but said the rule changes if there is another noun connected to the pronoun by a conjunction: ” … for John and I… ” This gives me indigestion.
I’d like the web log writer to comment on this. Or for someone tell me the proper place to inquire.
March 7, 2010 at 11:03 am
Gabe
David: I have never heard anyone propose such a rule, although I think that it does pretty accurately hit on a point of actual usage; the conjoined material introduces enough of a barrier between the preposition and the pronoun that people will sometimes switch the case assignment back to nominative.