This is another of those new developments in English that occasionally pop up to astonish me; Peter Dizikes reports for MIT News:
Back in the spring of 2022, professor of linguistics David Pesetsky was talking to an undergraduate class about relative clauses, which add information to sentences. For instance: “The senator, with whom we were speaking, is a policy expert.” Relative clauses often feature “who,” “which,” “that,” and so on. Before long a student, Kanoe Evile ’23, raised her hand.
“How does this account for the ‘whom of which’ construction?” Evile asked.
Pesetsky, who has been teaching linguistics at MIT since 1988, had never encountered the phrase “whom of which” before. “I thought, ‘What?’” Pesetsky recalls.
But to Evile, “whom of which” seems normal, as in, “Our striker, whom of which is our best player, scores a lot of goals.” After the class she talked to Pesetsky. He suggested Evile write a paper about it for the course, 24.902 (Introduction to Syntax).
“He said, ‘I’ve never heard of that, but it might make an interesting topic,’” Evile says. She started hunting for online examples that evening. Some of the material she ultimately found came from social media; one example was in a Connecticut state government document. Among her finds: “Dave, Carter, Stefan, LeRoi, Boyd, and Tim are special people whom of which make special music together.” And: “Our 7th figure in the set is one of the show’s main reoccurring [sic] characters, whom of which we all love to hate.” And: “Oh, that’s me whom which you’re looking for.” (Sometimes “of” is dropped.)
This being MIT, there is much discussion of “wh-movement,” “pied piping,” and the like, but however you slice it, it’s weird and interesting. I got the link via MetaFilter, where Mark Rosenfelder a/k/a zompist says with his usual good sense:
It’s not grammatical to me, but that doesn’t matter. Discovering a new bit of syntax is fun, and kudos to Evile and Pesetsky for noticing it and doing work on it.
Try not to harsh the buzz with endless comments saying it’s wrong to you. Welcome to how language works: not precisely the same for everyone.
I have a perverse liking for it and will adopt it from now on.
It is perversely pleasing, isn’t it?
The “zompist” point of view seems to imply that the whole notion of “hypercorrection” that I learned about in that sociolinguistics class I took back in the Late Bronze Age is an empty set. I’m not necessarily saying that this construction is a hypercorrection rather than simply an innovation, but it kind of has that vibe. Obviously something that begins as an error or confusion or eggcorn or what have you can become just a normal variant if enough people in the language community use it enough of the time, although then the question becomes how much is enough. Massive amounts of online text you can search through makes it easy to come up with some impressive-looking number of instances with a usage that is still statistically vanishingly rare when compared to the denominator of all situations where the usage, if cromulent, could have been employed.
I’m impressed by the paper’s of-less example (found on twitter) “Give my regards to Tiff Macklem of the Bank of Canada as well whom which I also am extremely displeased with.” Not least because it eschews the obvious move of preposing the “with” to the “whom” but leaves it at the end of the sentence to irk prescriptivists.
If you whittle “whom of which” or “whom which” down to bare “whom” in most of their examples, it would be Wrong Wrong Wrong — in the sense that someone who still natively speaks the somewhat archaic register of English in which “whom” is still a natural thing would use “who” there. Using “whom” in e.g. “whom is at the door”* is sort of the prototypical hypercorrection. And yet … many of these seem like colloquial uses rather than situations where someone who doesn’t have very good command of a/the more formal register of English feels the occasion calls for it but is then predictably disfluent in it. Although maybe that’s difficult to judge from sentences in isolation without seeing their surrounding context.
*Or “Dave, Carter, Stefan, LeRoi, Boyd, and Tim are special people whom make special music together.”
I don’t know, it doesn’t feel like hypercorrection to me — what would be the pre-hypercorrection version?
He said, ‘I’ve never heard of that, but it might make an interesting topic’
That’s a great response in any situation at any level of irony.
@hat: Consider the potential pre-hypercorrection version “Dave, Carter, Stefan, LeRoi, Boyd, and Tim are special people who make special music together.” Kind of boringly grammatical in the standard/prestige variety of AmEng without anything unexpected, although maybe a little oleaginous in tone?
But what would be the motive to change it to “whom of which”? It just doesn’t make sense to me.
As to motive, who knows what evil lurks, etc? See https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/whom-thurber.html
… [ᵐɓɘ̰ʔ̚]…
Admittedly, I’m only slowly getting used to as such filling the void that was left when therefore floated off to an unattainable register. As a reviewer I still tell authors to avoid it so readers won’t be held up by the question “as what”.
Anyway, reoccurring in this context is a beautiful example of an eggcorn that would be completely undetectable if we didn’t have enough attestations of recurring. I think that’s a genuine issue in historical linguistics.
“harsh the buzz”.
Try as I may, I can’t seem to harsh the buzz. Is that like putting ketchup on a nice slab of rare
ribeye steak?
Subject to quantification via corpus linguistics,* I should think it would be more typical to say “don’t harsh my buzz.” Swapping in “the” seems kinda arrogant, as if the speaker is treating his own mental state as indistinguishable from the public interest.
*FWIW the google n-gram viewer thinks “harsh my buzz” is a lot more common than “harsh the buzz.” Although “harsh my buzz” is slightly less common than “harsh my mellow.”
EDITED TO ADD: I am pleased to see that wiktionary is on top of the verbing of “harsh,” which I strongly suspect to be an innovation within my own lifetime. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/harsh#Verb
What’s going on? I think we have to start by identifying the meanings or syntactic functions of whom and (of) which. Both have taken on functions in, er, folk educated speech that are very different from those prescribed by the arbiters of prescriptive correctness. I sense (from a long distance) that of which means “out of a group”. Whom is a particle turning the referent of the preceding sentence into the topic of the next. Together, composite, they turn specific individuals from a collective referent into the topic, or (by reverse inference) marks a topicalized referent as member of a group.
I can’t get past Dizikes’ first example of relative clause, whom of which shouldn’t have commas.
Possibly “whom (of)” is intended to constrain the actual relative, “which”, to a personal sense (which it still could have, as in “our Father, which art in heaven”, before being unjustly relegated to mere non-personal use for some centuries.)
The choice of “whom” rather than “who” is probably to assuage the speaker’s unease about the construction by preemptively using a posh-register form, which automatically guarantees correctness (as Thurber notes.)
“Whom of which” reminds me how Greg Hirsch in Succession talks when he is trying to be taken seriously. It’s a poorly educated person’s attempt to imitate how they imagine overeducated people talk.
But, it just sounds gratingly wrong to me. Sometimes you have to let your inner snob loose. On one end of the prescriptivist spectrum there’s pedantic peevery, sure, but there is also some basic syntax that our parents, caregivers and elders try to pass onto us to maintain some sense of linguistic continuity between generations. “Whom of which” is on a level with “me wan bwepfast”. But I’m sure it will now become a shibboleth for young people and we old timers will have to live with it until we are lucky enough to move on.
@David E.: It could probably be antedated further, but substituting “who art in Heaven” for “which art …” in the Lord’s Prayer can be found as early as the 1630’s, in books that look to have been published under the aegis of the Established Kirk in Scotland. Which presumably means that the “which art” felt unidiomatic by then even in liturgical contexts where archaism might be tolerated more than in other contexts. Plus the Scots probably wanted to differentiate themselves from the Church of England translation whose Calvinist rigor was perhaps questionable.
Kusaal has been inventing a series of relative pronouns before our very eyes over the past fifty years, which (judging by the 2016 Bible translation) is now complete. You now have
onɛ ka ba tʋm la
who and they send the
“[the one] whom they have sent”
where onɛ is derived from the animate-gender singular demonstrative pronoun on “that/this” followed by the particle n, which follows the subject of a nominalised clause.
Including this particle after the object of the nominalised clause (here preposed before the particle ka, which doesn’t often really mean “and” despite my gloss) would have been completely ungrammatical for my informants as recently as the 1990’s. There were no relative pronouns in their speech: all relative clauses were internally-headed, with the head marked by a demonstrative or an indefinite pronoun, but the actual nominalisation marker being a quite separate particle, not necessarily even adjacent to the head; you can have clauses that are just nominalised like that, too, with no constituent marked as the head at all.
(My informants did sometimes complain about the bad grammar of the young.)
Depends on the emphasis:
The senator with whom we were speaking is a policy expert – there are 100 senators, and the one with whom we were speaking is a policy expert.
The senator, with whom we were speaking, is a policy expert – the senator is a policy expert, and we were actually talking with him.
…unlike in German or Russian, where commas are required in both cases.
@David Marjanović: I just find this particular non-defining version’s splicing the sentence to be grating and unnecessary and prefer something more like “We were speaking to a senator, who’s a policy expert.” I know, it’s an odd peeve.
Apropos: it’s not always easy getting a German to fully appreciate the difference between those two examples, or why it should matter. I’d long wondered about the lack of distinction in German and only recently encountered a German sentence in which the comma requirement had me wondering which I was dealing with.
Intonation does disambiguate it in German…
The version with the commas works as long as the senator has already been introduced in an earlier sentence. So without context, there’s no reason to say the commas are wrong.
I wonder how much this is a genuine trend. Already the Google hits for it are dominated by versions of this article. As for the few real examples found, in the age of Twitter (I mean X) and social media all kinds of bizarre or subliterate usages can be found if you are determined to find them.
As others have noted, in most of the examples it is simply replacing “who.” “Who is our best player.” “Who make special music together.” The latter is particularly weird since the general reasoning seems to that this is some kind of way to single out a person, but here it is being used to refer to a large group of six people that is not a subset of any other group mentioned. I don’t get it.
The next interesting question here – I can’t answer it – is if whom of which has entered spoken usage anywhere or if it belongs to written registers alone.
The paper is full of the customary unenlightening MITosis, but has some interesting examples; in particular, “which of which” also happens, so my theory about forced personal-reference doesn’t work.
It’s the “of which” which is the decorative addition, not the “whom (of)” (hence all the stuff about pied piping.)
Correspondingly, the paper claims that “whom of which” is simply used where the speakers would use “whom”; if so, the “whom” for “who” in “Our striker, whom of which is our best player, scores a lot of goals” is a separate phenomenon from the ofwhichery, and can be straightforwardly explained by Thurber’s masterly analysis.
In other words, the MIT News article is expressed in such a way as to misleadingly conflate two quite distinct abominations, only one of which (“whom” for “who”) is a hypercorrection; and it’s actually only the second which has excited linguistic interest as something new.
I don’t understand how “pied piping” is related. Isn’t that about moving pieces of the sentence to go with the relative/interrogative pronoun? The “of which” isn’t part of the underlying sentence in the first place.
The paper goes into that. Unconvincingly …
It isn’t all as daft as the MIT News article makes it appear though.
They toy with (and reject) a more plausible theory not altogether different from what I described for the newly-created relative pronouns in Kusaal above, with the relative pronouns not being identical with complementisers, so they get “reinforced” by further complementising pronouns.
In the end, they prefer the usual sort of Chomskyite autofrottage, with invisible sentence elements invisibly moving around.
I agree that whom started as a hypercorrection, and I endorse Thurber’s understanding of the sociolinguistics of hypercorrections. But if people now use it naturally in their high or literary register, I don’t think that’s how their grammar modules treat it. So what do we have?
For “whom”, as analysed above, I might suggest “topicalizing relative particle”, but I’m open for better descriptions.
To expand a little on the analysis of of which, I think it’s the same as in “one of which and some of which, i.e. making it possible to pick an undefined referent out of a set you just defined. Of which [something] is … also refers to a defined set that whatever follows is a member of. Maybe “extracting relative particle”?
I guess another way to say it is that whom is picking a specific referent out of the set defined by … of which, and, conversely, of which is making clear that the specific referent defined by whom is also part of a defined set.
(I’m doing introspection in a register I don’t have in a language I don’t speak natively.)
Some examples are quoted from the web, and others are author-generated sets of acceptable/unacceptable contrasts. I wondered how the authors determined…
…which set elements were acceptable/unacceptable. Answer:
…that the web quotes were intentional as opposed to typos or slips. Answer:
I know I should read the paper, but I fell off at “movement”.
(I’m doing introspection in a register I don’t have in a language I don’t speak natively.)
And yet it makes sense to this native speaker.
While the movement analysis may not be entirely convincing, the following is worth the price of admission, “There is of course no better sign that a syntactic construction forms part of the real grammar of real speakers than prescriptivists protesting against its use.”
These speakers were also asked to informally evaluate the online examples quoted in this paper, and in general found them acceptable. Three of these speakers volunteered simpler non-wh-which alternatives as preferable in a few cases, but with no apparent pattern or consistency across speakers as to which online examples prompted this response, so we do not report them here. —Palin, Sarah, Word Salads for All Occasions
Okay. I won’t say it’s wrong to me. It’s unparseable.
“There is of course no better sign that a syntactic construction forms part of the real grammar of real speakers than prescriptivists protesting against its use.”
I think this is actually more of a preemptive strike: “if you suspect that this usage is probably just marginal, then you’re just some sort of nasty prescriptivist, so there!”
I’d be interested in a more thorough examination of just how acceptable these sentences are to the actual speakers who produced them.
“Acceptable” is not an either/or thing. Kusaasi speakers, for example, often use “animate” gender pronouns for inanimates when they’re not thinking about language in particular, but if you ask the same speaker to repeat what they just said, they’ll “correct” the pronouns to inanimate, often without realising that they’ve done it. There’s no question of this being due to any kind of prescriptivism: there’s no local grammatical tradition to support any such thing. So, on the one hand, this is a real grammatical phenomenon that needs to be described in an adequate Kusaal grammar; but on the other hand, you’re unlikely even to encounter it in written materials, and if you asked a speaker about it, they’d probably deny everything.
(It may well be a change in progress, though; and neither Mooré nor Hausa, the most common L2s locally, have a grammaticalised animate/inanimate distinction.)
Yeah, marginal usages should have their acceptability measured on a scale. The fact that informants who rated the construction acceptable would sometimes suggest “better” alternative constructions seems to indicate that even they considered the borderline, rather than unquestionably grammatical.
invisible sentence elements invisibly moving around
Well, I agree that that is worse than your Kusaal invisible sentence elements, whom of which do at least stay put. (Yah boo.)
@Keith Ivey: The version with the commas works as long as the senator has already been introduced in an earlier sentence. So without context, there’s no reason to say the commas are wrong.
You make a fair enough point, especially since I’m only petting my peeve here. On that note, I might argue that if one is going to give an example of a clause without the required context (in a world full of senators, no less), then it would flow more smoothly without the commas. At any rate, in my experience a lack of clarity vis a vis the relative clause is when it should’ve been restricted and not the other way around.
Kusaal invisible sentence elements
Bah. A low blow.
In any case, those are completely different.
Kusaal invisible sentence elements are all clearly audible.*
You’ll be saying you don’t believe in imaginary numbers next.
* In the words of the Book of Eddyshaw: “By their sandhi shall ye know them.”
Okay, since hat is the native speaker who seems least baffled by this construction, maybe he (or any other volunteer?) can explain this minimal pair, from the first example given in the OP:
1a. Our striker, whom of which is our best player, scores a lot of goals.
1b. Our striker, who is our best player, scores a lot of goals.
What’s the difference, if any, between the two? Do they “mean” different things (for a broad sense of “meaning” that could include emphasis or focus or implicature rather than just what proposition about the state of the world is being asserted to be true)? If so, what? If not, what’s the motivation for saying 1a instead of 1b? Has something happened to the idiolects of some minority of speakers who use the construction that makes 1b a wording that just doesn’t occur to them as an alternative?
For extra credit, speculate what acceptability/grammaticality judgment those who use or are unfazed by 1a would attach to:
1c. “Our striker, whom is our best player, scores a lot of goals.”
since hat is the native speaker who seems least baffled by this construction
What the what? Whence are you getting that out-of-the-blue judgment? Did you miss the “astonish me” in the first line and the “weird” towards the end? I’m as baffled by it as anyone else, I’ve just gotten out of the habit of pointing, laughing, and forgetting that seems to be the standard response to weird constructions. You have good questions, but I don’t know if anyone is in a position to answer them.
@hat: When you said “and yet it makes sense to this native speaker” I took you to be referring to yourself in the third person (in a way that seemed common/unremarkable in context) and implying you had overcome your initial astonishment. On re-reading I am now thinking perhaps “this native speaker” referred instead to the young lady at MIT? Deixis, man …
I think it was Trond’s proposed explanation that made sense.
It does work for many of the cited examples, but not all, I think: e,g, “Aegon the Conqueror was based on William the Conqueror, whom of which was a bastard.”
It would be interesting to know if cases that don’t seem amenable to Trond’s explanation are actually regarded as less acceptable/more likely to be recast by their original speakers on reflection. There may not actually be just one single unique explanation of these forms (and even if some of them are a genuinely new grammatical phenomenon, others could still just be performance errors.)
I like the “doubly-filled COMP configuration” explanation rather better than the one the paper gives; I think the authors dismiss it rather too cursorily (on the basis of some really very far-fetched obscurum per obscurius reasoning from Tlingit and Ch’ol, no less. I mean, I know I just used Kusaal as a point of comparison, but really?)
I believe Hat was saying Trond’s introspective analysis made sense to him, not that the construction itself makes sense.
Exactly.
some sort of nasty prescriptivist
Well, yes. Even if it is marginal for this first generation of speakers, it is still evidently a thing. What are the other possibilities, viral solecism? And that it may not survive doesn’t really count, either, to my mind.
I wonder whether the preference for whom is more than just formalizing. It has a confusing grammatical function, as historical case continues to be lost, even from pronouns. Could this ultimately turn it into just a relativizing particle? So that of which is needed to actually tie the grammar together? Kind of like the double copula is is, where each one sits in its half.
Ooh, I like that!
Yes, I suspect something along those lines myself. As I said, the paper considers this only to reject it, in favour of a much more fanciful scenario.
In principle, several of these explanations could all be right: the thing might (for example) have started in the way Trond suggests, and then got generalised to other contexts because “which” was (for those speakers) losing its ability to function as a complementiser by itself.
In the Kusaal of my informants, as I said above, the complementising function that makes a relative clause into a noun-like thing is handled by a different word from the pronoun that actually picks out the head of the relative clause: in Proper English like what we speak, and in 2016 Bible Kusaal, these functions are combined in a single “relative pronoun”, but it Ain’t Necessarily So cross linguistically, and there is no reason why an erstwhile relative pronoun might not in the course of time lose one of these capacities, which would then need to be expressed by adding another word.
I think the paper’s characterisation “prescriptivist websites” is too sweeping. If someone posts a question on e.g. stackexchange, anyone can answer, and some may be more prescriptivist than others. Often the questioner is L2 and a modicum of prescriptivism is in order. If the question is “I read the following and am unsure what it means / whether it is grammatical” sometimes the correct answer is “it was a typo / L2 mistake / copy-paste error”. The best a nonoverdogmatic third party can offer in such case would be “it’s ungrammatical to me and I suspect it was a mistake”. The longer/wider the list of examples becomes, the less tenable the mistake hypothesis, but continuing to support it is not prescriptivist per se but rather a different flavour of subjective bias.
The Grammarhow example is the only one quoted that I would regard as definite pure prescriptivism.
I have no idea if any other whomwhichers in the examples think that whom has something to do with the plural, but I found this interesting: https://www.usingenglish.com/forum/threads/using-whom-of-which.159982/ .
That is indeed an interesting exchange; most respondents are bewildered and try to explain that it’s wrong, but the original poster says:
So it’s clearly a part of some people’s idiolect, and not a one-off disfluency.
What are the other possibilities, viral solecism?
That seems to be quite reasonable to me. “Oh, you’re supposed to say ‘Whom are you?’ Gotcha (makes a note of it)” I don’t know how else to account for the revival of whom here.
Whilst is now quite common in the UK, but not in the U.S. My sense is that it was archaic even in the UK in the 20C. Did it escape from some forgotten pesthole in Shitterton (Dors.) and begin multiplying once more?
(And yes, the town’s name really is < shit < OE; the river next to it was used as an open sewer. A Victorian attempt to substitute Sitterton was an ignominious failure.)
The perplexee there seems to be using “whom of which” to mean “some of which”, which of which falls under Engen’s Law (though it might also suggest yet another origin story.)
(Also “whom” is, strictly speaking, only the masculine plural of “who”, but the feminine plural “whoth” is not often used nowadays. I blame violent video games.)
David E.: It would be interesting to know if cases that don’t seem amenable to Trond’s explanation are actually regarded as less acceptable/more likely to be recast by their original speakers on reflection. There may not actually be just one single unique explanation of these forms (and even if some of them are a genuinely new grammatical phenomenon, others could still just be performance errors.)
Agreed. It may also be that there are two or more paths leading there, but grammaticalization works (through re-interpretation and systematization by listeners) on the surface phenomenon.
MMcM: I wonder whether the preference for whom is more than just formalizing. It has a confusing grammatical function, as historical case continues to be lost, even from pronouns. Could this ultimately turn it into just a relativizing particle? So that of which is needed to actually tie the grammar together?
Maybe, but that may also be that they the speaker starts out with ‘whom’. senses that that doesn’t work, and grasps for a patch. ‘Of which’ to the rescue. The William the Conqueror example could be just that, sensing that ‘whom’ would be wrong for traditional grammatical reasons.
David E.: In principle, several of these explanations could all be right: the thing might (for example) have started in the way Trond suggests, and then got generalised to other contexts because “which” was (for those speakers) losing its ability to function as a complementiser by itself.
Yes. Another explanation could be that ‘which’ is the standard relativizer, but creates an inanimate or an abstract on its own.
@Johanna: Very interesting, Plural ‘whom’ might have something to do with it, but she*’s saying clearly that to her ‘of which’ is referring to a wider group that the ‘whom’ is extracted from. Her problem (and that of some of the respondents) is that the subset (co-workers) isn’t really a subset, because the superset is the same by definition.
* I noticed the ‘she’ on proofreading. The fact is I’m reading a she here. Can’t help it. I’m also reading the over-confident replies as male.
As in the-thing-is is that, made famous by Obama?
Also amongst. The rest of the internet has been mocking the whole phenomenon by using whomst, which falls flat for me because, uh, we actually talk like that where I come from (the clitic form of du is /st/, like the verb ending, and it attaches to wem and wen and basically anything else…).
CAPTAIN: FOR GREAT JUSTICE.
the feminine plural “whoth” is not often used nowadays
That’s because it collides with the homographic ordinal wh-word, the animate form of whichth. This is actually a thing in Lojban: le xo moi gerku ponse do ‘the which-number -th dog belongs-to you?’, which is cromulent when the dogs are in a row or in numbered cages or what have you.
io .e’u lu le xo moi gerku cu se ponse do li’u
German, too: der wievielte Hund gehört dir/ist deiner. There are also French sightings of combientième, but there it’s not (so far) standard.
I like the Dutch word “hoeveelheid”.
Hungarian has hányadik “which-th”; with days of the month it’s in the possessive, hányadika van ma? “[the month’s] which-th is today?” I have heard the question “hányadik your-dog [is] it?”, with the answer “I think fifth or sixth. I’ve always had a dog.”
@David Marjanović: In the American English dialects I am sufficiently familiar with, amongst is uncommon, but whilst is moribund.
Whilst and amongst are less uncommon in the UK than the US, but unbeknownst swings the other way.
I noticed whilst in software documentation and forum posts coming from the UK branch of my former employer in the 2010s. Sounded charmingly quaint to me, but I gathered it was normal for them.
Whilst is now quite common in the UK: The Google ngram has whilst actually decreasing in BrE throughout the 1900s, but remaining more common than in AmE, for whatever that’s worth. I suspect it’s so noticeable to us Americans that we’re likely to overestimate its frequency in BrE. It’s always been much less common than while.
Fowler (1926) has a full page on the usage of “while (or whilst)” that says nothing about whether the latter is more archaic. Burchfield’s revision (1996) adds a note that whilst isn’t used in AmE, but again has no other comment on any difference; he uses it a couple of times himself. (But in the illustrative quotations for other entries, the old edition had several where whilst happened to appear; this edition has none.)
Butterfield’s revision (2015) says: “Whilst is far less frequent, tends to be more formal, is used particularly in BrE, and is relatively uncommon in AmE” — and it isn’t used anywhere in the book, only discussed.
I associate whilst with computer nerds fond of jokey archaisms like Unixen and virii.
I say “whilst” in Real Life (at least I think I do: it’s difficult to be sure once your attention has been drawn to the matter. Heisenbugs intrude.) At any rate, it doesn’t strike me as at all archaic or mannered. This seems to be yet another of those US/UK things.
It’s not a straight synonym of “while”: I use it (I think) only in the sense “although”, not “during the time that.”
What do the Antipodeans amongst us think?
io .e’u lu le xo moi gerku cu se ponse do li’u
.ie ‘Yeah’.
(I left out the subject-predicate separator cu.)
Evile’s paper was written for an introductory course in syntax. That’s impressive, but I wonder what the MIT is thinking giving it so much publicity — throwing an undergraduate to the sharks of the internet. Happy they did though. It’s very interesting.
On a more general note, the whole business of wh-movement and pied-piping seems to me as just a difficult way to talk about topicalization.
I can’t see it doing her any harm. It’s fully MIT-compliant, and negative opinions of unMIT types can always be attributed to ignorance of the Mysteries.
To be less snarky, it’s pretty well done compared with many of the productions of its school. (The fact that we’re enjoying discussing it at all speaks in its favour. The normal response to such things is aggrieved bafflement.)
One presumes that Pesetsky did most of the work apart from the data collection and suggestion of the topic: good for him, that he gives his co-author the credit he does. (My own name appears, through the generosity of colleagues, as a co-author on some papers where it might really have been more accurate to put “based on an original idea by David Eddyshaw” or even “thanks to David Eddyshaw, who made an appreciative comment on an earlier draft of this paper that one time.”)
“I noticed the ‘she’ on proofreading. The fact is I’m reading a she here. Can’t help it. I’m also reading the over-confident replies as male.”
Yes, I was thinking about a lady from the first comment (perhaps her example “I’ll also be in a room full of absolute strangers… who are YOUR co-workers, and whom of which might not get my humor… soooooooooooooo… lol.” is already marked).
Though i can’t exclude a man, of course. It just that his/her posture is more commonly assumed by girls… (In Russia at least: one of my impressions from North Africans, was that the space of personality traits is divided in m/f parts differently and in some ways local girls recemble our boys and vice versa).
“The perplexee there seems to be using “whom of which” to mean “some of which”, which of which falls under Engen’s Law (though it might also suggest yet another origin story.)”
DE, yes, for some reason “whom of which” – absolutely perplexing for me – feels “funny”, not “wrong”.
So all the time I was looking for some similar construction that could explain why.
Perhaps, you or rather she and her commenters have just suggested a candidate.
“One presumes that Pesetsky did most of the work”
I would not:)
1a. emphasizes that the striker is the one specific person out of a larger group who is the best. Restating it in a more conventional but wordy fashion:
1c. Our striker, who out of all the players on our team is the best, scores a lot of goals.
You can take this in the opposite direction as well:
1d. Our striker, our best player, scores a lot of goals.
Of course a superlative like best always implies some larger group from which the best is chosen. But in a construction like 1d. this larger group is completely implicit and never explicitly brought to mind.
In 1c. the existence of the larger group from which the best is chosen, is made quite explicit and even emphasized. 1a. accomplishes the same objective with a good deal more economy.
Regarding this rogue formation:
2a. Aegon the Conqueror was based on William the Conqueror, whom of which was a bastard.
I have a very difficult time keeping Game of Thrones lore straight, but I believe that Aegon the Conqueror was not actually a bastard (in the sense of “child of unmarried parents”) whereas William the Conqueror quite famously was.
So the function of whom of which in 2a. is to point up that of the two – Aegon and William – only William was a bastard.
Compare with this version:
2b. Aegon the Conqueror was based on William the Conqueror, who was a bastard.
2b. identifies William as a bastard but does not point up the distinction that William was a bastard whereas Aegon was not.
2c. Aegon the Conqueror was based on William the Conqueror – but William was a bastard whereas Aegon was not.
2c. means the same as 2a. but is a lot more wordy.
FWIW I made much the same argument as Trond did in several comments above – except far more clumsily and using many more words – in the Metafilter thread.
So +1 to Trond – whom of which said it best!
I have no idea why this article was selected for coverage, but MIT often publicizes scientific publication that arose out of the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program. With such publications, you cannot really know how the workload broke down.
unbeknownst swings the other way
I think it’s partly that opportunities to use it don’t seem to arise very often.
I found it handy for rendering the Kusaal verb zi’ “not know” in cases where it’s used by itself without a subject as a sentence modifier:
Zi’, ka dau la siigi la ka o gban’e mori kul.
not.know and man the life.force.LINKER that and he grab.LINKER have.LINKER go.home
“Unbeknownst, it was the man’s life force that he’d seized and taken home.”
FWIW I made much the same argument as Trond did in several comments above – except far more clumsily and using many more words – in the Metafilter thread.
Thanks for prompting me to take another look at the thread, where you did indeed make good points.
I think it’s partly that opportunities to use [unbeknownst] don’t seem to arise very often.
The OED says that unbeknownst is “originally colloquial and dialect”, first recorded 1848, but also “now of much wider currency than in the 19th. cent.” Unbeknown is synonymous in all of its three senses: unbeknown to ‘without the knowledge of’ 1636, unbeknown ‘unknown’ 1824, and unbeknown absolutely, ‘without the knowledge of someone’ 1866. For me, unbeknownst in the first sense is the normal case.
Amongst, whilst, amidst, unbeknownst …
Where does this -st come from? They all seem vaguely similar syntactically, and presumably analogy has been at work somehow.
(Chambers says midst is from a genitive “with excrescent t“, but that just raises more questions …)
a genitive “with excrescent t“, but that just raises more questions …
When something unexpected is seen, an extrovert calls it excrescent. An introvert might call it the expression of a hidden parameter – not “zero”, of course. This whole business is peekaboo essentialism – now you see it, now you don’t.
@flug: Thanks! And thanks for saving me from working through the exceptions. I knew I needed to add something about how the construction can show extraction even from an unmentioned set.
But:
I have a very difficult time keeping Game of Thrones lore straight
You and me both.
So the function of whom of which in 2a. is to point up that of the two – Aegon and William – only William was a bastard.
Yes, I wondered about that, but couldn’t be bothered to research the matter.
Compare with this version:
2b. identifies William as a bastard but does not point up the distinction that William was a bastard whereas Aegon was not.
I think I would conclude by implicature that Aegon is a bastard too, and that this even was the most important feature modeled after William. Why else make a point of William’s bastardness in this sentence?
2c. means the same as 2a. but is a lot more wordy.
This sentence makes it a main point that Aegon was not a bastard. The whom of which construction may have been preferred because it puts less emphasis on the matter.
Where does this -st come from? They all seem vaguely similar syntactically, …
etymonline has “also archaic alongst (13c.-17c.)”
Superlative adjectives? contracted -most? Utmost, foremost [**], …
among-most, while-most (in the middle of the action), amid-most (in the thickest of the thick), unbeknown-most
[**] etymonline sems to think foremost is not simply fore + most:
It seems most evident to me that unbeknownst started out as emphasis: “utterly un(be)known”. The same works for amidst and amongst and maybe alongst and… easily, in fact, for whilst (“at the very same time”).
On the other side of the sea, in keinster Weise – “in no way”, but with “no” in a nonce superlative – has 4.51 megaghits…
Try *-mh₁o-, and everything unstressed in zero-grade: *pr-m̩h₁-is-tó-s…
BTW, Latin -issimus is thought to come from *-is-m̩h₁ó-s, so two of the same three suffixes in a different order, though don’t ask me why it didn’t become **-irimus then – or -īmus, as I guess it did in none other than prīmus.
OED teaches me that these are all late forms, coming from the original adverbial suffix -s, still evident in once, hence, overseas, and dozens of others (sunderlepes, bafts, anauntrins, etc.) The -t seems to be an innovation of Early Modern English, perhaps modeled after superlative -st. It looks like about that time the adverbial -s became less productive, so presumably it stopped being recognized as a morpheme.
Betwixt is old, though.
Oh, like… German nachts “at night”, which looks like a masculine or neuter genitive formed from a feminine noun?
The -s is indeed adverbial, but the -t is superimposed because it’s easier to pronounce, AFAICT.
As for -īmus, that’s got to be the original form: see for some more primordial superlatives.
oncet /wʌnst/ is dialectal, but never caught on at large.
Wiktionary…
…sv -st lists against alongst amongst beknownst midst unbeknownst whilst whomst
…sv -t lists against, amidst, amongst, betwixt, whilst, twicet (surely some are foo+st not foos+t?)
…to which I add acrost
Then there is hist~whist~whisht to parallel hush
Is “acrosst”* standard/conventional in any extant variety of English, as opposed to being widespread but deprecated as erroneous? It’s in my own ideolect, although the closely related verb “to cross” lacks a /t/.
*It seems ironic to be the least bit prescriptivist about a deprecated variant, but the “acrost” spelling just looks wrong to me.
Whilst is in both lists.
Check out the three quotations for whomst! Turns out it’s real!!!
Any chance crossed was crossed in?
(Yay! I finally remembered there’s no /sd/-/st/ contrast in English!)
o, “whomst” is quite common in a particular sarcastic-formal register – mainly online or as meatspace bleedthrough from its online circulation.
to my ear, it’s mostly an affectively distinguished variation of “who|m” at this point, but i think it emerged as a shortening of (sarcastic-formal) constructions like “whomst among us”, where the “-st” is functioning to mark singling out of a particular person from a group (pretty much as in “amongst”) and emphasize a contrast (similarly to “unbeknownst”).
*-is-m̩h₁ó-s
As far as I can tell the usual reconstruction is *-is-m̥mo-; thus Weiss and Sihler, with -issimus unsatisfyingly explained by “affective gemination” and the other types/instances (facillimus, acerrimus, maximus, prīmus, postrēmus etc.) mostly regular with syncope. I don’t know what’s up with the *-m̥m- (Sihler: “remarkable”).
… though I guess *-m̥m- could be from an earlier *-m̥H-.
Yes, but that’s obviously nonsensical. I really don’t think *h₁ in this position would leave any other trace in Italic. Actually, that holds for any other *h, too, I think.
Instead of “affective”, how about analogical consonant stretching, analogical to the -illimus and -errimus words?
I think *-m̥H- > *-m̥m- would work with any laryngeal (it would have to be at the PIE level though since the simple suffix has reflexes outside Italo-Celtic). And analogy for -issimus does seem plausible as long as rhotacism postdated the *-Rs- > *-R:- change, which as far as I can tell is the case. Wiktionary mentions it as a possibility; I wonder why Weiss and Sihler don’t.
The extreme regularity of -issimus, a, um suggests that there were a variety of different outcomes that were replaced by analogy. It is itself compound < *-is ‘comparative suffix’ + *-t + -mmos ‘absolute superlative, per Wikt. Not mentioned there is Proto-Celtic -isamo etc.
Not mentioned there is Proto-Celtic -isamo etc
Indeed. That’s why e.g. the superlative of Welsh teg “fair” is tecaf (*teghaf, with h < *s as usual.)
I wondered about this, but *st > ss is not regular. Compare the 2nd-person perfect endings -isti & -istis.
The only reflexes given there are Germanic, where any laryngeal would just disappear in this position.
Good to know that pessimus is regular, though (*ped-t-), so that’s another possible source of analogy.
-tm̥mós is continued in Indo-Iranian. What happens to *-m̥HV- in that branch?
Oh, that’s interesting. I’d expect *-aá-, but I can’t, off the top of my head, think of any examples of this. On the other hand, the infamous ending *-eh₂m ended up as -ām, so if word-final *m̩ became -am, maybe *m̩ followed by a laryngeal, or a specific laryngeal or two, did the same, so *tm̩HV́ became the observed -tamá-…
To my ear, “who/whom amongst us” implies the singular, whereas “who/whom among us” includes the plural.
That’s probably the influence of the KJV.
JC, exactly which version of KJV do you mean? How would its usage work in favour of “who/whom amongst us” implying the singular, but “who/whom among us” including the plural (to adapt the words of Fraklin Halasz, above)? Preliminary investigations turn up nothing to support this claim.