Than

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:47 AM -0800 11/11/04, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>against this background, you'd expect the sticklers to insist on "than
>who".  but fronted "than" + NP looks an *awful* lot like PP fronting,
>and (probably as a result of this fact) even the stickliest sticklers
>require "whom" in this case.  MWDEU notes that Lowth 1762 insisted that
>"than" was always a conjunction, *except in this one context*, where it
>had to be a preposition (and govern the accusative) -- a systematic
>exception that MWDEU suggests arose from the authority of Milton in
>Paradise Lost ("Beelzebub... than whom, Satan except, none higher
>sat").
>
>Garner quotes the OED as stating that "than whom" "is universally
>recognized instead of _than who_".  in a fit of common sense, however,
>he labels "than whom" awkward, "essentially a literary idiom".  what
>we're supposed to use instead, he does not say.  surely not "the one
>than who I am better".  and if "than" is always supposed to be a
>conjunction in formal writing, then "the one who I am better than"
>would be utterly impossible there; english has stranded prepositions
>(even garner concedes this), but not stranded *conjunctions*.  the
>implied advice is to reword so as to avoid the problem entirely.
>
I suspect that what makes the Milton-type example somewhat more
natural than the one Ed opened this thread with,

She's the one than whom I am better.

is precisely the emptiness of the comparison clause.  So compare the
Beelzebub example with

Beelzebub...than whom Satan sat higher.

--somewhat worse, right?  Milton's original is "about" Beelzebub, and
is essentially equivalent to the proposition that Beelzebub sat the
highest of all (except Satan), while Milton-Prime's example is
largely about Satan, just as the Atlantic's example is about me
(rather than, or in addition to, about her).  This seems to be a
factor in the comparative acceptability of these admittedly somewhat
stilted (but some more stilted than others) examples.  I'm reminded
of Kuno's observation about the differential acceptability of

*That's a child who I know {a/the} family who's willing to adopt
(?)That's a child who I know nobody who's willing to adopt
   [= that's an unadoptable child]

Checking out my speculation on google, I find a couple dozen
naturalish-sounding examples for "than whom nobody", e.g.

Executive producer Tom Fontana, than whom nobody on television is more
pomo-intertextual, includes so many inside jokes that I'm sure I
missed half of...

Rush Limbaugh, than whom nobody has a larger radio audience,

It was, of course, Jean, than whom nobody could invest a sniff
with a deeper or richer range of meaning.

Paul Bocuse, than whom nobody could be finer,

 From this distinguished kin came Richard, who
later succeeded him, than whom nobody was braver or more generous


Checking under "than whom I...", a quick glance suggests that most
are of the related form
"than whom I know nobody better"--if we eliminate the irrelevant ones
(e.g. those with a sentence break before "I").  Not surprisingly, the
first two hits are for the example from The Atlantic cited by Ed.

larry