190 Chapter 11 Relative clausesGender: personal vs non-personal
Normally the word 'gender' is associated with sexual characteristics or identity, but
as a grammatical term it has a broader sense. The primary gender system in English,
discussed in Ch. 5, §8.2 for the 3rd person singular personal pronouns, is indeed
based on sex, but not all gender systems in language are, and even in English there
is also a secondary gender system that is based on the contrast between personal
and non-personal. This applies to interrogative and relative pronouns - but in the
relative construction that we are currently considering the non-personal pronoun is
different from the interrogative:
[ 1 7]
PERSONAL
11 NON-PERSONALINTERROGATIVE
Who did you see?
What did you see?RELATIVE
the person who annoys me most
the thing which annoys me mostNote also that while interrogative whose is personal, relative whose is neutral as to
gender: compare personal a guy whose car was stolen and non-personal a book
whose pages were fa lling out. (In interrogatives this doesn't happen: you can't ask
about a collection of old books * Whose pages are fa lling out?)
Who is used for humans primarily, but sometimes other entities, like robots,
extraterrestrials, or animals, especially pets: She was stroking the cat, who was look
ing extremely contented.
Case: nominative vs accusative
Who is a variable lexeme. In addition to its nominative form who and its genitive
form whose, it also has an accusative form whom (though this is vastly less common
than who). The factors affecting the choice between who and whom are essentially
the same as for interrogatives (see Ch. 9, §2.4):
The nominative is required in subject or predicative complement function.
The complement of a fronted preposition is normally accusative (the woman
to whom he was engaged).
Elsewhere BOTH cases are found, with the accusative being more formal in
style.^4One difference from interrogative clauses, however, is that in integrated relatives
the choice between the cases is very often avoided by use of the non-wh construc
tion: [18iii] is us ed as a neutral way of sidestepping the choice between the dis
tinctly formal [18ii] and the distinctly informal [18i].
[ (^18) ] the applicants who we interviewed
11 the applicants whom we interviewed
III the applicants (that) we interviewed
[nominative: informal]
[accusative: formal]
[non-wh : neutral]
4 Particularly in supplementary relatives, the PP may be complement within a fronted NP, as in She
hadn't yet informed her colleagues, most of whom were still on holiday. The accusative in this con
struction (which has no interrogative counterpart) is not markedly formal in style.