redundant Ps; relativizer "of which"?

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

over on the Language Log, we've been looking at cases of redundant
preposition marking (well, mostly, mark liberman and geoff pullum
have) -- cases where a clause has *both* a fronted *and* a stranded
preposition (and some related cases).  usually it's the same
preposition, doubled:

   The group to which arthropleura belongs to ...

but sometimes there are two different prepositions, as in this
passage (twice) from a stunningly poor writer:

   I am one of those Liberals with which this publication has a
somewhat unhealthy obsession towards. This article would like to
explore some issues to which this newspaper often propagates on ....

here are the postings on the subject.  we're not soliciting more
examples -- as mark liberman eventually points out, they are only too
easy to find -- unless you have some that are different in character
from the ones we've looked at.  i do have two requests, though.

   http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004464.html

   http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004465.html

   http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004493.html

   http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004498.html

   http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004510.html

first request: if you come across an example from someone you know
and can talk to about what they wrote, i'd appreciate hearing what
they thought they were doing with this construction.  although some
of the examples are surely just inadvertent errors, we suspect that
some people produce the redundant Ps intentionally, and they might be
able to say what effect (emphasis?  formality?) they were trying to
achieve with them.  (i'd expect that people with the redundant Ps
also have simple fronted Ps and simple stranded Ps, so there might be
a three-way contrast in discourse function and/or style.)

a few days ago i thought i had a live one, when frank maloney wrote
on soc.motss:

   When my mother was the bad girl of Boise in 1930s, she and her
crowd always finished their nights of breaking their mothers' hearts
at a particular chop suey joint. She always claimed it was the best
thing with which to sober a girl up with. Burp.

frank tells me he did it deliberately, but for humorous effect.  damn.

second request: for instances of "of which" apparently serving as a
marker of relativization.  i heard what i think was this phenomenon
on the radio several days ago, on a program i couldn't transcribe at
the time or track down later.  the speaker repeatedly used "of which"
at the beginning of relative clauses that had no missing "of" in them
-- things like "the man of which I met yesterday", except that (i
think) all her examples were more complex than this.

this would be a kind of grammaticalization of fronted "of", not an
astonishing development.  (by the way, other prepositions might serve
this function.)

google searches on "of which" are, of course, hopeless.

arnold

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