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Wollin says:
>I don't see anything in Leuschner's response that helps explain why the
>whom in the first sentence cannot be omitted while the one in the second
>sentence can. Whereas, if we say that if it functions as a noun, it is a
>noun, we get an explanation.
>> >"I don't know who(m) I saw last night".
>> >"I like the girl who(m) i saw last night.
1. Of course, you can call anything anything at all. You might call it
'moon' or 'XYZ'. And argue: if we say it functions as the moon, it is the
moon.
2. Whatever you call it, whether 'moon' or 'noun' or 'wh-sentence', the
name as such does not explain anything at all.
3. Neither would the name 'adjective' for the wh-sentence in (2) explain
why 'who(m)' can be omitted there.
4. If 'who(m) I saw last night' IS a noun sometimes, and an adjective at
other times, normal human logic goes down the drain. No scientist would
accept something so blantantly illogical, only language people put up with
this. And Even defend it.Strange!
5. BTW, to apply some sort of internal logic. If the wh-sentence is called
noun in the first sentence, then these structures would also have to be
called nouns:
that he did it
her
about it
he did it
if he saw her
whether everybody is ok
And these would all have to be called adjectives:
in the house
running down the road
made in Japan
fitting in almost every car
the
6. I mean if it helps a body to call these completely different grammatical
structures nouns and adjectives - no problem. But they shouldn't infuse
students with this muddled way of thinking, because students before they
come to school look at the world, and this includes language, like
scientists, it's only afterwards, when school teachers are done with them
and they come to college that they have lost their natural gift of logical
thinking.
7. Ah, yes, and how to explain that sometimes wh-pronouns can be omitted
and sometimes they can't? Wh-sentences, as I tried to show, perform a great
number of functions. When they are noun attributes, and the pronoun
functions as object or as a 'prepositional object', then they pronoun is
sometimes replaced by zero. In non-standard English this happens also when
the pronoun has subject function. This is not really an explanation, it is
just a description.
Is there an explanation? I'm not sure. You might argue that the noun (girl)
refers to the same referent as the pronoun and that therefore the pronoun
need not be repeated. But the same is true for appositives (non-defining
relative clauses), and there the pronoun cannot be 'omitted' (perhaps in
non-standard English - but this where native speakers are the experts).
So there doesn't really seem to be an EXPLANATION, we are left with
DESCRIBING the conventions adhered to by those speakers whose English is
usually called 'standard'.
Anyway, using a word-class label (like 'noun') for a function certainly
does not explain anything.
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Burkhard Leuschner - Paedagogische Hochschule Schwaebisch Gmuend, Germany
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