murky days on the WHO/WHOM front

[Arnold Zwicky]

drew danielson, responding to peter mcgraw re "regardless of
whom should be blamed" as a possible syntactic reanalysis:
 >It sounds more like hypercorrection to me.  It would be interesting
 >to be able to track the WHOM-misuser's WHO/WHOM usage across time
 >and context....

well, it almost surely *starts* as a hypercorrection - using the
explicit rule "use WHOM after a preposition or verb" without regard to
the grammatical functions of WHO(M) - but eventually it can become
frequent enough that other speakers pick it up as just an option
in the language, or even as the only option.  that's syntactic
reanalysis.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)