"which" = 'who'

[Jonathan Lighter]

His voice was very even and confident. It did not sound like a slip. The
student exx. I used to see occasionally didn't seem like slips either. Nor
did they refer to de-animated individuals.

I doubt too whether many people would think, "I saw a corpse  - I mean a
lady! - which had slumped over on the table."

JL

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 9:01 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "which" = 'who'
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Sep 7, 2011, at 8:53 PM, Spanbock/Svoboda-Spanbock wrote:
>
> > If she was dead, maybe it was a slip? Dead people aren't exactly
> > persons in the same way.
>
> I think it was Jim McCawley who pointed out the difference between:
>
> the corpse which/*who was sprawled on the table
> the dead person (dead lady, dead man,...) who/*which was sprawled on the
> table
>
> But maybe not everyone shares these judgments.
>
> (Of course, "dead body" works like "corpse":  the dead body which/*who was
> sprawled on the table.)
>
> LH
>
> >
> > On Sep 7, 2011, at 12:15 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> >
> >> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> >> -----------------------
> >> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> >> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> >> Subject:      "which" = 'who'
> >>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >>
> >> Eyewitness to Carson City IHOP shootings, on CNN: "I saw a lady
> >> which had
> >> slumped over on the table."
> >>
> >> Guy (on phone) otherwise well-spoken, sounds white, not young. But
> >> not old
> >> enough to be a speaker of Middle English, either.
> >>
> >> I used to see this occasionally in freshman themes more than twenty
> >> years
> >> ago. It would not occur to me in ten million years to use "which" in
> >> this
> >> way.
> >>
> >> JL
> >>
> >> --
> >> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the
> >> truth."
> >>
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