Re: Multiple wh-words

On Monday, February 28, 2005, at 04:47 , Ph. D. wrote:

> caerulean centaur wrote:
[snip]
>> You need to explain to me this in-situ language.  It seems to me
>> that, regardless of emphasis, "who" is still the object of the
>> verb "saw" and should be "whom" (for those of us who still use whom).
>
>
> This has nothing to do with the distinction between "who" and "whom"
> or subject and object.
>
> Suppose I come home. My girlfriend might say to me,
>
> "Who did you see at the library?"
Yep - that would be the normal word order. But if my wife came in and told
me she'd seen so-and-so at the library and I didn't catch the name
properly, I might well respond with:
"You saw WHO at the library?"

In fact, I find nothing particularly odd in: "Who saw who, where and where?
"
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On Monday, February 28, 2005, at 03:49 , Andy wrote:

> ***gmail warning***
>
> There's nothing wrong with that sentence in the English I speak.
>
> Well, nothing except I would say "Who did who see?"
Now that does sound odd to me. In the colloquial English I'm familiar with,
  the auxiliaries 'do/does/did' are not use when the in-situ interrogatives
are used. I would simply say: "Who saw who?"
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BTW I get the impression that the actual use of "whom" in _spoken_ English
is confined to parts of north America. Is that so? Certainly in this neck
of the woods (southern UK) it would sound odd & somewhat affected in
normal colloquial speech. IME it's even rare in more formal spoken modes.

Ray
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http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

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