Re: Multiple wh-words (was Re: LUNATIC SURVEY: 2005)

Ray wrote:
> 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?"
Yeah, but in testing for superiority effects we want to avoid
echo questions like this.

> 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.
I'll second Roger on this.  I'm much younger than him, and I know
essentially no one other than academics in linguistics departments
who use 'whom'.  But because of standardization, probably most
people are aware of it in somewhat the same way most people are
aware of "thou", though they don't know how to use it. (I saw a
flyer the other day with "Whomever wants to take these...")

I myself use it on occasion, and I never use "thou" other than reading
texts aloud, so I suppose it has some sort of not entirely
petrified existence...

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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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