A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

Prescriptive grammar note

§4 Fused relatives 191

Some prescriptive usage books and style guides insist that integrated (or 'defining' or

'restrictive') relative clauses with non-personal heads should never be of the wh type -

that is, that an integrated relative should not begin with which. We have paid no attention

to this so far (the second example in this chapter, [lii], is an integrated relative with

which). Our reason is that the suggested restriction has no basis; no one who looked at the

evidence could continue to believe in it. Integrated wh relatives with non-personal heads

have been occurring in impeccable English for about 400 years. Among the most famous

cases are sentences that everyone will recall hearing, such as Render therefo re unto Cae­

sar the things which are Caesar's (the King James Bible, 1611), and a date which will live

in infamy (Franklin D. Roosevelt's often misquoted remark about the day of the 1941

Pearl Harbor attack). Those who recommend against integrated which often turn out to

use it in their own writing (one usage expert said 'I recommend using that with defining

clauses', but then wrote a typical situation which a practiced writer corrects on the very

next page!). Integrated relatives with which are grammatical in all varieties of English,

and the notion that there is something wrong with them is just an invention of prescrip­

tivists.

4 Fused relatives

The final relative construction we consider in this chapter is the fused
relative, illustrated in [19]:

[ 19] i Whoever said that was trying to mislead you. }

ii I've eaten what you gave me.

[fused relatives]

This is a more complex construction than those dealt with above. Here the
antecedent and the relativised element are fused together instead of being expressed
separately as in simpler constructions. The underlined expressions here are thus
NPs whose head is fused with the first element in the relative clause.

Whoever in [i] is simultaneously head of the NP and subject of the relative

clause, and its gender indicates that we are talking about some person. The mean­

ing is thus comparable to that of the non-fused The person who said that was

trying to mislead you.

What in [ii] is likewise head of the NP and object of gave in the relative clause,

and the non-personal gender gives a meaning like that of the non-fused (and

more formal) I've eaten that which you gave me.

Relative words in the fused construction

The major relative words that occur in this construction are as follows:

[20] who

11 whoever

whom

whomever

what

whatever

which

whichever

where

wherever

when

whenever