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More About Clauses. Just when you thought you knew everything there was to know about clauses… A clause by definition, remember, has a subject & a verb. A clause can be independent or dependent (subordinate).
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Just when you thought you knew everything there was to know about clauses… A clause by definition, remember, has a subject & a verb. A clause can be independent or dependent (subordinate). Important to the study of subordinate clauses is the difference between “who” & “whom.” “Who” is nominative (a subject); “whom” is objective. The problem is that “whom” usually occurs in a question or a subordinate clause, where word order is different from the way it is in an independent clause that’s a statement, & that throws people off.
Consider these examples: Who is going with me? “Who” is the subject of the sentence. That fact becomes obvious if you replace it with a name: John is going with me. In MOST questions, the subject does NOT come first: Is he going with you? Why is he going with you? Where is he going? How is he going? Don’t you want him to go?
In a question, you have to determine whether it’s the subject or object in order to determine if you need “who” or “whom.” Whom do you need? -- You need whom? Who is living here? -- Hu is living here. (In Chinatown.) Whom can we see? -- We can see whom? With whom do I eat? – I eat with whom? In the last sentence, “whom” is an object of a preposition. OBJECTive case pronouns can be a direct OBJECT, an indirect OBJECT, or an OBJECT of a preposition. Admittedly, “With whom do I eat?” sounds a bit pretentious. In normal conversation we would say, “Who do I eat with?” But you’re not supposed to end a sentence with a preposition. At least compromise & say, “Whom do I eat with?”
In a subordinate clause, it’s a little trickier. Part of the trickiness is the fact that “that,” “who,” “whom,” & “which” can be both the subordinating conjunction & a subject or object at the same time. (Conj. & subj. OR conj. & obj.; not subj. & obj. Duh.) They are their own special set of words called “relative pronouns.” If you are identifying their part of speech, you could call them either conjunctions or pronouns, although most people would call them pronouns. To figure out if one of these words is functioning as a subject or object, put the clause in normal subject + verb + object order: This isn’t the man that I met yesterday. I met that yesterday. When you put it in subj-verb-obj order, you see that “that” is the direct object in the clause. That should tell you right away whether you’d use “who” as a substitution for “that” or if you’d use “whom.” This isn’t the man who/whom I met yesterday. I met whom yesterday. “Whom” is an object, remember, while “who” is a subject.
Let’s try a few more: 1. We aren’t going to visit the girl who/whom you like. you like whom. 2. I really don’t know who/whom manages this place. who manages this place. 3. That’s the girl you like. Ooooohhhh, tricky! There’s no relative pronoun/subordinating conjunction here! What do we do? There’s an understood relative pronoun: That’s the girl who/whom you like. you like whom. Very frequently we leave out “whom” or “that.” We can leave them out only if they’re the object. BTW, don’t assume the same is true in any other language you study. Chances are that it’s not. Sometimes a “that” is just a conjunction & doesn’t have any other role in the clause: I know that he’s running. He’s running. – “That” doesn’t fit anywhere in the clause.
