Grammar doubts

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Grammar doubts

Postby Woods » 2021-03-15, 11:04

I've been a little bit too casual with the conditionals, but teaching French has made me reconsider if I'm using them right in English.

None of that would ever happen if you spoke with him.

None of that would have ever happened if you had spoken with him
.

It is a known fact that she didn't speak with him. Can both be used or only the second and what's the difference?
Last edited by Woods on 2021-10-08, 18:20, edited 1 time in total.

azhong

Re: Conditionals

Postby azhong » 2021-03-15, 13:08

You know I'm not a native speaker.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/gramma ... tionals-if

The first sentence means the "you" doesn't speak with him now.
The second means the "you" didn't, at a past moment.

One more point, about the word order:
None of that would ever happen if you spoke with him.
None of that would ever have ever happened if you had spoken with him.

I guess your version is also grammatical but mine is more natural. I'm unsure, though. It's my recent discovery through studying Ms. Rowling's sentences. I am looking forward to comments regardless.

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Re: Conditionals

Postby Dormouse559 » 2021-03-15, 19:17

Woods wrote:I've been a little bit too casual with the conditionals, but teaching French has made me reconsider if I'm using them right in English.

None of that would ever happen if you spoke with him.

None of that would have ever happened if you had spoken with him
.

It is a known fact that she didn't speak with him. Can both be used or only the second and what's the difference?

The first sentence implies that the addressee hasn't spoken with him yet, but it allows for the possibility of speaking with him later. The second sentence implies that the addressee didn't speak with him at a certain time in the past.

I have no issue with your placement of "ever"; it can go before or after "have".
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Re: Conditionals

Postby linguoboy » 2021-03-15, 20:01

Woods wrote:I've been a little bit too casual with the conditionals, but teaching French has made me reconsider if I'm using them right in English.

None of that would ever happen if you spoke with him.

None of that would have ever happened if you had spoken with him
.

It is a known fact that she didn't speak with him. Can both be used or only the second and what's the difference?

My usage agrees with Dormouse's here. However, I will say that increasingly I hear:

None of that would have ever happened if you spoke with him.

from native speakers of USAmerican English, to the point where I would call this "nonstandard" but not "ungrammatical". I think it's tied to the ongoing reduction in usage of the perfect in USAmerican English generally.
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Re: Conditionals

Postby AntonioD » 2021-05-28, 9:56

Both of them are correct, it depends on what you mean. The first one for example implies something has not happened yet and if you speak to him, it will not happen, while the second one refers to something that already happened and you could have avoided by talking to him. I hope it makes sense.

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Re: Grammar doubts

Postby Woods » 2021-10-08, 18:21

Time-sequencing of the if-clause

I told someone that it would be great if we do this or that.

I told someone that it would have been great if we did this or that.


When talking about the past (i.e. I told someone happened before, it isn't happening now) and the event the if- subordinate clause refers to happened, should there be time sequencing of the if-clause with the main clause?

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Re: Grammar doubts

Postby linguoboy » 2021-10-08, 19:09

Woods wrote:Time-sequencing of the if-clause

I told someone that it would be great if we do this or that.

I told someone that it would have been great if we did this or that.


When talking about the past (i.e. I told someone happened before, it isn't happening now) and the event the if- subordinate clause refers to happened, should there be time sequencing of the if-clause with the main clause?

So this is a complicated issue, for several reasons. One is that the system is currently in flux (particularly with the ongoing loss of the perfect in USAmerican English). Second, even before recent developments, there has been disagreement among grammarians over best practice with regard to sequencing of tenses going back at least as far as the 1700s. And third, it varies based on what is actually being expressed and what the speaker is trying to emphasise.

Let's take the sentence: I told someone that it would be great if we do this or that. If I heard this, I would assume that the telling happened in the past but that the suggested action has not occurred but may still. That is, the present tense on do tells me that this statement is still valid at the present time.

Of course, that interpretation is still possible with: I told someone that it would be great if we did this or that. In this case, the whole indirect quotation is backshifted and it's possible that the opportunity to do the thing has passed or that it hasn't; only further context can make this clear.

Now, so far, this is the debate in English going back to the 18th century: Is it better to backshift both clauses or to preserve something closer to the original wording? There are good arguments on both sides and it mostly comes down to personal preference.

Now here's where it gets complicated. In modern USAmerican English, it is also possible for:

I told someone that it would be great if we did this or that.

to be counterfactual. Now, prescriptive guides will tell you the way to state this clearly is:

I told someone that it would have been great if we had done that.

and you will still hear speakers use this. (It's how I naturally speak, for instance.) But I regularly hear speakers drop both the have and the had even when the statement is clearly contrary to fact. Again, these statements are rarely ambiguous in context, but they perfect-less version tends to make me pause a moment as I try to work out what the speaker actually intends.
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Re: Grammar doubts

Postby Woods » 2022-01-06, 11:52

remember the guy whom / which / that you did this and that with/to?

Is there a subtle difference - like for example, if you say "which" you show less appreciation for the person than if you say "whom"?

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Re: Grammar doubts

Postby linguoboy » 2022-01-06, 16:29

Woods wrote:remember the guy whom / which / that you did this and that with/to?

Is there a subtle difference - like for example, if you say "which" you show less appreciation for the person than if you say "whom"?

Using "which" here sounds off to me. Not disrespectful, just odd. I think it's the most marked relative pronoun, but I couldn't say exactly when I think it's the most acceptable choice.

There might be a slightly less positive tone to "that". For some reason, "the guy that you did this to" sounds more natural to me than "the guy that you did this with".

"Whom" sounds wrong here. I would only ever use it when the relative pronoun appears directly after the preposition, i.e. "the guy with/to whom you did this". But now that sentence sounds odd because I would only avoiding splitting pronoun and preposition in very formal registers and those registers don't generally allow "guy".

Honestly, what sounds best to me is no explicit relative pronoun at all, i.e. "the guy you did this with/to". I'm pretty sure that's what I would say in conversation 90+% of the time.
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Re: Grammar doubts

Postby Woods » 2022-01-06, 17:46

"Remember that man you met in Los Angeles whom you spent your whole trip thinking about?"
"Remember that man twenty years ago whom you used to be married to?"


If we replace "whom" with "that," there is too much repetition (at least it feels like too much to me).

If we just take away the object pronoun, the phrase becomes somewhat unclear.

You're saying "which" sounds off.

What would you do?


linguoboy wrote:I would only ever use [whom] when the relative pronoun appears directly after the preposition, i.e. "the guy with/to whom you did this".

This is surprising to me. But are you sure it is not just personal preference? I always use "whom" when it refers to an object, regardless of whether it follows or precedes the subject.

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Re: Grammar doubts

Postby Dormouse559 » 2022-01-06, 18:24

linguoboy wrote:
► Show Spoiler

This. I'd add something, but it's exactly what I would've said.

Woods wrote:"Remember that man you met in Los Angeles whom you spent your whole trip thinking about?"
"Remember that man twenty years ago whom you used to be married to?"


If we replace "whom" with "that," there is too much repetition (at least it feels like too much to me).

If we just take away the object pronoun, the phrase becomes somewhat unclear.

You're saying "which" sounds off.

What would you do?

Regarding the first sentence, "that" isn't too big of an issue. However, the most elegant solution for me would be to put the two actions in a single relative clause: "Remember that man you met in Los Angeles and spent your whole trip thinking about?"

The second exmaple sentence would not be unclear without a relative pronoun. Not sure how I feel about "twenty years ago" hanging out there, but I'd have no issue parsing out where the relative clause begins.

Woods wrote:
linguoboy wrote:I would only ever use [whom] when the relative pronoun appears directly after the preposition, i.e. "the guy with/to whom you did this".

This is surprising to me. But are you sure it is not just personal preference? I always use "whom" when it refers to an object, regardless of whether it follows or precedes the subject.

It's a question of register, clashing levels of formality. "Whom" is quite formal, but putting a preposition at the end of a relative clause is not; in fact, if you're in a context that calls for "whom", chances are people will call you out for using final prepositions.
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Re: Grammar doubts

Postby linguoboy » 2022-01-06, 20:31

Woods wrote:"Remember that man you met in Los Angeles whom you spent your whole trip thinking about?"
"Remember that man twenty years ago whom you used to be married to?"


If we replace "whom" with "that," there is too much repetition (at least it feels like too much to me).

If we just take away the object pronoun, the phrase becomes somewhat unclear.

How? I get exactly the same interpretation either way.

Woods wrote:What would you do?

I've already told you.

Woods wrote:
linguoboy wrote:I would only ever use [whom] when the relative pronoun appears directly after the preposition, i.e. "the guy with/to whom you did this".

This is surprising to me. But are you sure it is not just personal preference? I always use "whom" when it refers to an object, regardless of whether it follows or precedes the subject.

It's a personal preference. It also happens to be the everyday usage of the great majority of native English-speakers.

Try this for fun: Search "whom" on this board and take a look at who uses it and where.
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Re: Grammar doubts

Postby Linguaphile » 2022-01-07, 2:18

Woods wrote:remember the guy whom / which / that you did this and that with/to?

"Remember that man you met in Los Angeles whom you spent your whole trip thinking about?"
"Remember that man twenty years ago whom you used to be married to?"


First of all, I agree with the answers that have already been given about "which" not sounding right, and about the common use of "who" in place of "whom" in this type of sentence in informal English.
I tried saying aloud your sentence "Remember that man you met in Los Angeles whom you spent your whole trip thinking about?" with "whom," "who", and "that" to see what sounded the most natural to me.
I'd be most likely to say either "who" or "that". It sounds perfectly fine to me with either one.
But guess what else happened? Without meaning to or thinking about it, I slipped an extra word in there, and it was an additional "that":

Remember that man that you met in Los Angeles, that you spent your whole trip thinking about?
Remember that man that you met in Los Angeles, who you spent your whole trip thinking about?


I did it without thinking. When I realized it and thought about what I'd said, I realized I could have also have used "who" instead:

Remember that man who you met in Los Angeles, that you spent your whole trip thinking about?
Remember that man who you met in Los Angeles, who you spent your whole trip thinking about?


Of course, my added word is entirely optional. And in my speech the second and/or third "that" is heavily de-stressed, so that it might sound something like:
Remember that (/ðæt/) man th't (/ðət/) you met in Los Angeles, th't (/ðət/) you spent your whole trip thinking about?

Probably the different pronunciations help to make it seem less repetitious, even in writing, because I read it with those pronunciations in my head. But I'm not sure that matters.

I know that you aren't going to like my addition of "that" here, and aren't going to use it which is entirely fine, but your comment below is exactly why I'm bringing it up - you worry about repetition more than I do, and this serves as a good example of why that might be the case:
Woods wrote:If we replace "whom" with "that," there is too much repetition (at least it feels like too much to me).

Not only does it not sound like too much repetition to me, I'd be perfectly okay with adding that additional repetition of it, and in fact did so when I tried to say the sentence in the way that felt natural to me without giving it too much thought. The thing is that native speakers don't tend to notice word or morpheme repetition in the same way that non-native speakers do, when it is done for grammatical reasons. A good analogy is to say that sometimes a repeated word that has to be repeated for grammatical purposes is kind of like the glass in a window pane: if it's missing we're going to notice and it won't seem right, but when it's there, it's invisible and we don't even notice its presence. Instead we look through it, at whatever is happening on the other side.

I posted a longer post related to repetition here quite a while back in the conlang forum, which I'll quote from here as it seems relevant:
Linguaphile wrote:
My question is, how repetitive do sentences end up if you have perfectly regular case endings with a singular declension?

First of all, whether they have case systems or not, many languages have situations in which there is a lot of repetition of word endings or entire words. Generally, I think speakers of those languages don't tend to notice the repetition much or give it much thought.
For example, English tends to repeat the word "the" a lot. (German doesn't have the same level of repetition of its definite articles precisely because of the case system and the three genders; there is a much wider variety of definite articles that can be used - der, die, das, den, dem...) In English we tend not to notice the repetition of the word "the". (For example, in your post, in your first five sentences you used the word "the" seven times. Yet it didn't seem to excessively repetitious at all. In fact, I had to have my computer's search function highlight them in order to accurately count all seven, because our brains are actually pretty used to not paying much direct attention to them, and without using the search function I skipped over one or two without realizing it even when I was actively trying to count them.)
...
Fluent speakers don't consider it odd-sounding; in fact, they hardly notice it.
...
You end up with sentences like this:

Pakub gruppidele ja üksikisikutele ekskursioone ajaloolistesse lossidesse, vanadesse mõisatesse ja muudesse ilusatesse hoonetesse.
(key to colors: genitive plural (-te-/-de-), allative (-le), illative (-sse), partitive plural (-e))

The English translation of that sentence also has a repetitive ending that doesn't sound especially jarring:
"It offers groups and individuals excursions to historical castles, old manors, and other beautiful buildings."

For the Estonian sentence, you can see here the effect of the regularity of the allative and illative cases. This obviously doesn't happen to that extent in every sentence, but it does happen fairly often on a smaller scale (i.e. two or three words with the same ending). It doesn't sound bad to me. The focus really is on the meaning, not the sound, so it just "sounds right" rather than odd, just like the repetition of "the" or the ending "-s" does in English. Because it has a grammatical function, it would actually sound odd without it.


On a similar note, there is one of those brain-teaser challenges that asks English speakers to count how many times the letter "f" appears in a sentence, and the point of it (the reason it is a brain challenge) is that most native English speakers don't count the word "of" so they will end up with the wrong number of f's. (This is the same phenomenon that made it difficult for me to count instances of the word "the" in what I described in the quote above. And it can also apply to the word "that" and other words.) In the case of that brain challenge, it is partly because in the word "of" the letter "f" sounds like a "v", but it's also partly because we just tend to ignore it in favor of focusing on the parts of the sentence that add more significant meaning. Like the window pane, it's necessary but invisible, a sort of pass-through word that deflects attention away from itself onto other parts of the sentence. So even when it's there a lot of times in a sentence or paragraph, we're still not going to think it sounds repetitious.

Or as they explain it on the website I linked to above about the "counting f's" activity:
https://business-english-success.com/ wrote:When we process language, we don’t give the same importance to every word. We tend to skip the little words, such as ‘in’, ‘on’, ‘of’, ‘at’ etc. and give most of our attention to the nouns and verbs. In other words, when we read the test sentence, we don’t really read the three instances of the word ‘of’ – we just blur past them.
These two points account for why native speakers tend to see three, instead of six.
Native speakers?
I’ve specifically mentioned native speakers more than once and there is a reason for this.
When you first learn a new language, all of the words are unfamiliar and all have equal importance. As you get more familiar with the language, you start to process the words in a more targeted way, for example, glossing over the small, familiar, words.
What this means is that if you give this test to someone who doesn’t speak English, they will most likely get the correct answer of six because, for them, it really is a pattern-matching exercise.

Naturally there are times when you want to avoid repetition in writing, and it may be difficult to find the balance between using a word too much and going out of your way to avoid repetition where it would have seemed "invisible" to native speakers. But in general I'd say that it's best to avoid repeating words that represent the subjects, objects, and non-copular verbs in a sentence, and don't worry too much about repetition of the smaller functional words.

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Re: Grammar doubts

Postby Woods » 2022-01-07, 15:52

Dormouse559 wrote:
Woods wrote:
linguoboy wrote:I would only ever use [whom] when the relative pronoun appears directly after the preposition, i.e. "the guy with/to whom you did this".

This is surprising to me. But are you sure it is not just personal preference? I always use "whom" when it refers to an object, regardless of whether it follows or precedes the subject.

It's a question of register, clashing levels of formality. "Whom" is quite formal, but putting a preposition at the end of a relative clause is not; in fact, if you're in a context that calls for "whom", chances are people will call you out for using final prepositions.

It's very interesting how you think in terms of registers, and I only do in terms of grammar.

What can I do to grasp these things? :(


Should I downgrade all my whom's to who's when I'm not formal?

Place all the prepositions before the pronouns and clauses they refer to* when I'm formal?

* (I mean to which they refer... - you both are about to make me paranoid about the way I speak. The more we discuss these things, the more I get the impression that my English is an illogical combination of many styles that wouldn't naturally come together)



linguoboy wrote:Try this for fun: Search "whom" on this board and take a look at who uses it and where.

Mostly me and azhong :D

All right, I get what you mean - so "whom" is totally out of fashion?

Also in the UK / Australia / other English-speaking countries?


linguoboy:

linguoboy wrote:The tip of a calligraphy brush is also called a nib. By whom?

Was that your phrase?
Why did you use whom then - irony?


dEhiN (from Canada):

dEhiN wrote:"So does it not stand to reason that there would be some native speakers for whom bread is only considered uncountable"

dEhiN wrote:"There's no indication or implication of whom you said the "I love you"s to."

(same clashing styles as mine)



Dormouse559 wrote:Not sure how I feel about "twenty years ago" hanging out there, but I'd have no issue parsing out where the relative clause begins.

What if we replace whom with who?

"Remember that man twenty years ago who you used to be married to?"

"Remember that Jessica ten years ago who I'm sure you're still thinking about?"


(linguoboy, I get confused if we remove the pronoun - "Remember that Jessica ten years ago I'm sure you're still thinking about?" - I no longer get the sense of how the two parts of the sentence relate to each other and need to force myself to think to figure it out.


I will reeeeaaally miss whom if I should do away with it - I've used it everywhere all my life.



Linguaphile wrote:Not only does it not sound like too much repetition to me, I'd be perfectly okay with adding that additional repetition of it (...)

The thing is that native speakers don't tend to notice word or morpheme repetition in the same way that non-native speakers do, when it is done for grammatical reasons. A good analogy is to say that sometimes a repeated word that has to be repeated for grammatical purposes is kind of like the glass in a window pane: if it's missing we're going to notice and it won't seem right, but when it's there, it's invisible and we don't even notice its presence. (...)

Naturally there are times when you want to avoid repetition in writing, and it may be difficult to find the balance between using a word too much and going out of your way to avoid repetition where it would have seemed "invisible" to native speakers. But in general I'd say that it's best to avoid repeating words that represent the subjects, objects, and non-copular verbs in a sentence, and don't worry too much about repetition of the smaller functional words.

Thanks - I will keep that in mind.

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Re: Grammar doubts

Postby linguoboy » 2022-01-07, 17:24

Woods wrote:It's very interesting how you think in terms of registers, and I only do in terms of grammar.

What can I do to grasp these things? :(

Read. A lot. Read a wide variety of authors, genres, and styles. Eventually you'll start to notice the patterns--what words and usages go together and which are specific to certain registers, dialects, or even particular speakers.

Woods wrote:Should I downgrade all my whom's to who's when I'm not formal?

Not necessarily. "Whom" isn't altogether absent from informal registers, it's just extremely rare.

Woods wrote:Place all the prepositions before the pronouns and clauses they refer to* when I'm formal?

This, on the other hand, isn't such a bad idea. It's a pretty consistent feature of higher written registers in English.

Woods wrote:* (I mean to which they refer... - you both are about to make me paranoid about the way I speak. The more we discuss these things, the more I get the impression that my English is an illogical combination of many styles that wouldn't naturally come together)

Probably so--but so what? Native speakers generally cut L2 speakers a lot of slack in this regard. Eventually you'll get it sorted.

Woods wrote:All right, I get what you mean - so "whom" is totally out of fashion?

Also in the UK / Australia / other English-speaking countries?

I wouldn't say "totally". It's still fairly common in formal written registers throughout the Anglosphere. But it can sound snooty in speech.

Woods wrote:
linguoboy wrote:The tip of a calligraphy brush is also called a nib. By whom?

Was that your phrase?
Why did you use whom then - irony?

No, because the pronoun directly follows the preposition and, in this case, "By who?" sounded jarring to me. In colloquial speech, I would generally split the phrase and say "Who by?" but it looks odd to write that. So I went with a higher-register form which looked better to me on the page.

(For reference, the full sentences corresponding to these ellipses would be:
1a. By whom is it called that?
1b. Who is it called that by?

1a sounds way to elevated to say in an ordinary conversation. Even 1b is somewhat stilted, since the most natural formulation would be active voice, i.e. "Who calls it that?")

Woods wrote:(linguoboy, I get confused if we remove the pronoun - "Remember that Jessica ten years ago I'm sure you're still thinking about?" - I no longer get the sense of how the two parts of the sentence relate to each other and need to force myself to think to figure it out.

This might not be a bad thing, because sentences like this are extremely common in colloquial registers of the language.
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Re: Grammar doubts

Postby Woods » 2022-01-08, 10:49

linguoboy wrote:
Woods wrote:
linguoboy wrote:The tip of a calligraphy brush is also called a nib. By whom?

Was that your phrase?
Why did you use whom then - irony?

No, because the pronoun directly follows the preposition and, in this case, "By who?" sounded jarring to me. In colloquial speech, I would generally split the phrase and say "Who by?" but it looks odd to write that. So I went with a higher-register form which looked better to me on the page.

(For reference, the full sentences corresponding to these ellipses would be:
1a. By whom is it called that?
1b. Who is it called that by?

1a sounds way to elevated to say in an ordinary conversation. Even 1b is somewhat stilted, since the most natural formulation would be active voice, i.e. "Who calls it that?")

It is good to be aware of those usages.

It sounds so illogical however to use who as an object pronoun when it precedes the preposition and whom when it follows it.

Maybe that's the common usage and I don't get how unnatural it sounds but I don't feel like using who as an object at all.

Shouldn't we strive to be a little bit more consistent and grammatically correct?

I could give you a corresponding example from my native Bulgarian where 90 % of people nowadays say it one way and I do otherwise, but more grammatically correct, and I bet I sound like a writer from the 19th or early-20th century at latest to the educated and maybe even foreign and confusing to some less well-read people, but at the end I just want to say it that way.

The problem is I may not have that awareness with English to judge, but still I feel like if I use "who" as an object, it must be always whom.

How bad is it to clash styles? Isn't our speech generally a mix of different degrees of formality?

And at the end, shouldn't we have our own style - and can using "whom" as the only possible object pronoun regardless of register be part of mine?

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Re: Grammar doubts

Postby linguoboy » 2022-01-08, 18:41

Woods wrote:It sounds so illogical however to use who as an object pronoun when it precedes the preposition and whom when it follows it.

To you because you didn't grow up speaking that way. There's nothing inherently "illogical" about having particular words take different forms when they appear in different syntactic contexts.

Woods wrote:Shouldn't we strive to be a little bit more consistent and grammatically correct?

But using "whom" consistently (according to your understanding) is not "grammatically correct". Grammar is decided by common usage. I've explained to you what the common usage is. What you choose to do with that information is entirely up to you.

Essentially, you're seeking to impose an idea of what the grammar of English should be based on...I'm not sure exactly. Historical usage? The way congruence works in other languages? But determining how English should work based on how Bulgarian works or Middle English works would be as ridiculous as determining how Bulgarian should work based on how English works or on how Old Bulgarian used to work. These are different languages with different rules; you can't easily generalise from one to another.

Woods wrote:I could give you a corresponding example from my native Bulgarian where 90 % of people nowadays say it one way and I do otherwise, but more grammatically correct, and I bet I sound like a writer from the 19th or early-20th century at latest to the educated and maybe even foreign and confusing to some less well-read people, but at the end I just want to say it that way.

And no one is stopping you. Feel free to sound every bit as pedantic in English as you do in Bulgarian.

Woods wrote:The problem is I may not have that awareness with English to judge, but still I feel like if I use "who" as an object, it must be always whom.

Feelings aren't facts. English grammar doesn't work how you feel it should, full stop.

Woods wrote:How bad is it to clash styles? Isn't our speech generally a mix of different degrees of formality?

Generally not. IME, there's a pretty consistent set of features associated with various registers and mixing them too freely has a jarring effect. Sometimes that's intentional--there's a whole genre of memes based on restating pop song lyrics or common saying in deliberately elevated and pseudo-archaic speech. What's important to realise is that language is being used in a particular way to produce a desired effect, and if that's not the effect you desire, you probably should be using it differently.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

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Re: Grammar doubts

Postby Woods » 2022-01-09, 10:17

linguoboy wrote:
Woods wrote:It sounds so illogical however to use who as an object pronoun when it precedes the preposition and whom when it follows it.

To you because you didn't grow up speaking that way. There's nothing inherently "illogical" about having particular words take different forms when they appear in different syntactic contexts.

True, but it comes from the same Germanic and before that Indo-European idea that an indirect object must be in the dative, and therefore take the m.

I didn't grow up with English, but I grew up with Bulgarian, which presents the same problem.

The illogical for me is that two forms that are different only because of their grammatical function in the sentence are now selected depending on their position, while the purpose of what made them different was to make their position in the sentence irrelevant.


linguoboy wrote:you didn't grow up speaking that way.

We did grow up being taught in school how it's right to speak though, which did not always correspond to how we were taught by our parents. So such inconsistency would be pointed out for sure.

Indeed, when it comes to these pronouns, there are different degrees of, I wouldn't say formality but, old-fashionedness:

кой - who

кого - whom, but half of the people say кой also when the pronoun is an object, which to me sounds awful

кому - to whom, but I would not use that unless exceptionally, it sounds very dated to me, I would say на кого, but maybe that could sound bad to some older people too; while many would say на кой and probably think that mine is pretentious, and I think theirs is awful

but the difference with what you're explaining about English is that each person would pick their set of pronouns (who - who - to who / who - whom - to whom or who - whom - towhom2) and stick with them in every degree of formality and every context. Or at least I think so.


linguoboy wrote:I've explained to you what the common usage is.

Appreciated. Still would've been good to also hear from some Britons / Australians / Canadians how they feel about it.


linguoboy wrote:
Woods wrote:How bad is it to clash styles? Isn't our speech generally a mix of different degrees of formality?

Generally not. IME, there's a pretty consistent set of features associated with various registers

Would be interesting to hear more about that. Sounds like an important thing to be aware of, yet I don't remember anyone ever talking about styles of speech in English class.

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Re: Grammar doubts

Postby Linguaphile » 2022-01-09, 16:08

Woods wrote:it comes from the same Germanic and before that Indo-European idea that an indirect object must be in the dative, and therefore take the m.


Woods wrote:The illogical part/thing/aspect for me is that two forms that are different only because of their grammatical function in the sentence are now selected depending on their position, while the purpose of what made them different was to make their position in the sentence irrelevant.

Okay, but in English (and Bulgarian) we no longer use dative forms elsewhere, so their use in situations like this is just a remnant of the former case system. It makes sense that their use has shifted, too, it just hasn't shifted (yet) quite as much as it has for those words that have completely lost dative forms. For example the former dative-accusative form is basically only seen in English in a few words like whom and some pronouns (him, her, them, us, me). For every other noun we make no distinction, so it's not surprising that the distinction is also starting to disappear with "whom" as well.
It's also common for English speakers to make errors in the use of the "dative" pronoun forms, especially when more than one pronoun is involved (while hardly anyone would say "Me is going to the store after work," sentences like "Me and her are going to the store" or "Him and I....." are common). These are errors in formal-register language, and they are the type of thing that English teachers are endlessly correcting their students about, but they are common in spoken form.
English speakers in general don't have much awareness of the fact that these are former case forms or what their original purpose was, unless they've studied another language that does use cases (and I'd bet many more Bulgarians know a language that uses cases compared to how many English-speakers know such a language, percentage-wise, so Bulgarians may have a better understanding of why those dative remnants are there than English-speakers do).

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Re: Grammar doubts

Postby linguoboy » 2022-01-10, 0:01

Woods wrote:
linguoboy wrote:
Woods wrote:It sounds so illogical however to use who as an object pronoun when it precedes the preposition and whom when it follows it.

To you because you didn't grow up speaking that way. There's nothing inherently "illogical" about having particular words take different forms when they appear in different syntactic contexts.

True, but it comes from the same Germanic and before that Indo-European idea that an indirect object must be in the dative, and therefore take the m.

So what? Germanic and Indo-European before it had distinctive personal endings for three persons and two (in PIE three) numbers; Modern English preserves only -s. That's language change at work.

(Moreover, what's so logical about using a "dative" ending for both dative and accusative objects? This in itself represents a substantial change from how English used to work.)

Woods wrote:I didn't grow up with English, but I grew up with Bulgarian, which presents the same problem.

It's not a "problem"; it's simply a fact about English. How Bulgarian works is not at all relevant here.

Woods wrote:The illogical for me is that two forms that are different only because of their grammatical function in the sentence are now selected depending on their position, while the purpose of what made them different was to make their position in the sentence irrelevant.

No it wasn't. Language evolution isn't teleological. Not even all languages with distinct case endings have free word order. (German doesn't, for instance; the exact position of a word with dative endings in a German sentence is anything but irrelevant.)

It's not at all unusual for forms of words to vary based on their position in a sentence. After all, word order is one of the most common means of showing emphasis and emphasis often affects the evolution of words and morphemes. The distinction between pronoun pairs like "I" and "me" in English is no longer strictly one of case. "Me" is the default form, preferred when emphasising the pronoun ("Me, I don't like that") and when gapping ("He may like that, but not me".) "I" is only really required directly before a finite verb and not always then. (Despite what Linguaphile says, sentences like "Me and her are going to the store" do not represent "errors"; this is simply how contemporary Modern English works in colloquial registers.)

So it's perfectly logical for "who" to take one form when immediately following a preposition and another when separated from it. Word order matters--for morphosyntax, for semantics, for pragmatics, for phonology, for everything. I don't know of any language--Indo-European or otherwise--for which that is not the case.

Woods wrote:
linguoboy wrote:you didn't grow up speaking that way.

We did grow up being taught in school how it's right to speak though, which did not always correspond to how we were taught by our parents. So such inconsistency would be pointed out for sure.

but the difference with what you're explaining about English is that each person would pick their set of pronouns (who - who - to who / who - whom - to whom or who - whom - towhom2) and stick with them in every degree of formality and every context. Or at least I think so.

Nope, that's not how it works. It's not just word choice that varies between registers; grammar varies, too. "Whom" in contemporary English signals formality (to the point where people will even mistakenly use it in contexts where a subject pronoun normally appears--an example of what is known as "hypercorrection").

Woods wrote:
linguoboy wrote:
Woods wrote:How bad is it to clash styles? Isn't our speech generally a mix of different degrees of formality?

Generally not. IME, there's a pretty consistent set of features associated with various registers

Would be interesting to hear more about that. Sounds like an important thing to be aware of, yet I don't remember anyone ever talking about styles of speech in English class.

I guess they think it's too confusing? Or possibly they simply expect you to pick it up yourself from being exposed to different forms of speech and writing.

Entire books have been written on speech register, or even just particular aspects of it. IME, most English-speakers understand the concept although they might not have a word for it. They know that how you write a research paper is not the same way you text your mates; in fact, as I said before, there's a lot of humour that depends on recognising inappropriate use of register. Wikipedia presents a model of speech register based on the work of Martin Joos which contains five levels:

1. Frozen
2. Formal
3. Consultative
4. Casual
5. Intimate

This isn't bad as a first approximation as long as one keeps in mind that each of these levels contains multiple registers. For instance, Baby Talk is a distinctive register in English (and other languages). Moreover, it's one that most people are familiar with and occasionally use, whether or not they have small children. Strictly speaking, it belongs to the "Intimate" level (being primarily used between caregivers and children in private settings), but it's not uncommon to find it used in "Casual" situations, generally for humourous effect. (I had a roommate who used to tease me when I got grumpy with, "Issims tired? Doessims need a nap?" It was an attempt to use humour to defuse some of the tension of the situation.) Using it where a "Consultative" register is expected, however, would be jarring and perhaps even deeply insulting.

Because it's such a complex subject, I try to identify differences of register when I offer corrections and suggestions. Azhong, for instance, typically uses a fairly elevated written register for his English writing practice. I keep this in mind when making corrections, but I will sometimes point out when a particular usage is restricted to this register so that he doesn't try to use it in casual conversation, such as when addressing other board members.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons


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