Whom anxiety?

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:41 PM -0400 6/29/11, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>The first sentence in the lead article of today's NYTimes, writen by
>Nelson D. Schwartz and Eric Dash:
>
>"Bank of America is completing an agreement to pay $8.6 billion to
>settle claims by investors that purchased mortgage securities that
>soured when the housing bubble burst, according to people briefed on
>the deal."
>
>Did the writers have whom anxiety, fretting over whether to use
>"whom" or "who" in the phrase "by investors that", and evaded the question?
>
I doubt it; "whom" seems pretty unlikely for anyone to use in this
context (as opposed to others in which it's equally "incorrect").  I
think it's more plausible that this is a case of "that" selected
(either optionally or obligatorily depending on one's grammar-check
and style sheet) to introduce restrictive relative clauses.  If it
had been a non-restrictive--

...to settle claims by careless or over-optimistic investors, who had
purchased mortgage securities..."

--both prescriptive edicts and ordinary usage agree on "who" over
"that".  But for restrictives, there's a mismatch between what people
do (which often involves "who/which") and what grammar books and
grammar-checks tell them to do (which mandates "that").  I think we
and/or LanguageLog have discussed this issue before.

LH

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