Re: English Subjunctive

Andrew Patterson wrote:
> But, thinking of that great film, "She" with Ursula Andress. In the film
> Ursula was refered to as "She who must be obeyed."
Ho! So _that's_ where it comes from!! I'd only heard it in the old Rumpole
TV series, where R. always refers to his wife in that way.  I've seen both
the ancient 1930s version as well as the U.Andress version, but long ago and
far away..........Never, however, read the book.

(Memory jog: in fact, it was a double bill of the 1930s versions of "She"
and "Last Days of Pompeii". Classics!!)

>If I convert this into a
> relative clause, I could say,
>
> "I[subject 1]am going to visit she[subject 2] who must be obeyed.
>
> Somehow, "I'm going to visit her who must be obeyed," sounds wrong, so
relative clauses (or at least the one above has two subjects but no object.
>
> Can anyone tell me what's going on here?
>
In this case I think SWMBO is being treated as a unit, an epithet, thus a NP
in its own right. Consequently the sentence would be parsed as--
#S [NP I NP] [VP [V am going to visit V] [NP SWMBO NP] VP] S#

or in other words a simple SVO sentence where the whole phrase SWMBO is the
O.  I think it's true that most modern spoken Engl. avoids things like "he
who..., ...her who..." etc.  And even in writing, we would tend to avoid,
I'm sure, "...them who..." in favor of "...those who..."

Technically correct:  "I spoke to them who visited me" but 99.9% of us would
say/write "I spoke to those (or, the ones) who....."

The deleted portion of your post, involving the verb "wish", would require a
separate treatment.