Re: CHAT: which's

John:
> Andreas Johansson scripsit:
>
> > >To say that 'which's' seems odd in that context would be an
> > >understatement. I'm not sure what the rules are about contractions, but
> > >that seems totally against them
> >
> > It does?  What, specifically, makes it odd in the above context? In what
> > contexts would you expect it?
>
> "Which's" is never acceptable in standard English.  Poking around on Google,
> I find it in one of three contexts:
>
> 1)      There's a poem out there entitled "The Which's Ballad" by William
>         Bell Scott, where it is clearly an eccentric spelling of "Witch's"
>
> 2)      Non-native users (as indicated by the nature of the other errors
>         they make) sometimes use it for "which is"
>
> 3)      Occasionally native speakers use it as a replacement for the standard
>         possessive relative pronoun "whose" (which is just an eccentric-but-
>         standardized spelling of "who" + "'s") when the antecedent is
>         inanimate.  "Who" is never applied to inanimates, and there is a
>         Sprachgefuehl against applying "whose" to inanimates either,
>         notwithstanding it is standard
>
>         Here's an example of this usage:  "Those commas in between signify
>         each field you don't need to export but which's column you need
>         to preserve."
>
> But the right thing for non-native speakers is simply never to use it
There is nothing specifically wrong with _which's_ as a morphological
string: "the book the cover of which's bottom corner is dogeared".
Rather, there is a rule of phonological expression that changes
_which_ to _who_ when it is argument of the determiner _'s_, which
is something that affects most other personal pronouns (me, us, you,
him, them, but not it, her or one).

--And.

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