murky days on the WHO/WHOM front

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:41 AM -0500 3/29/02, sagehen wrote:
>The appearance of this subordinate clause on another post this morning:-
>"all of whom had a great sense of humor".... which could have been just as
>correctly expressed as  "who all had a great sense of humor"... brings
>several thoughts to mind:  (1) no wonder people get confused! and (2) it's
>easy to understand why someone might suppose that if syntactic analysis and
>close examination for meaning  combined can't lead to one *correct* result,
>the whole enterprise must just be so much BB-stacking.

But I still think it's a fact about the morphosyntax of "who(m)"
specifically.  In the same two environments, most standard English
speakers would immediately have verified

they (*them) all had a great sense of humor
all of them (*they) had a great sense of humor

It's only when the WHOOM swoops in that everyone gets flustered.

larry