Karl, your point that personal pronouns don't (usually) take relative clauses is well taken. I searched for contrary examples of "them who" and found mostly older translations of biblical verses. One of many in the KJV is Isaiah 5:20: " Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil..." A more recent translation (New International Version) renders Jeremiah 23:4 as "I will place shepherds over them who will tend them..." There are also sayings of the "He who laughs last" variety, and there was a fairly recent song, "I Who Have Nothing," but there are few colloquial counterexamples to the restriction.


Dick


On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 12:50 PM, Karl Hagen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
This problem has nothing directly to do with who/whom (a distinction that the SAT does not test).

You can’t just look at the single word following “by.” The object of the preposition is “them/those who did not approve it,” and the required word has to do with how it functions in this unit, which is a noun phrase headed by them/those.

The relative clause “who did not approve it” modifies them/those. But “them,” as a personal pronoun, virtually always stands alone in the noun phrase. It doesn’t take modifiers like the relative clause. I won’t get into a detailed analysis of “those," as modern accounts differ from a traditional analysis and the differences aren’t to the point here. Suffice it to say that “those” isn’t a personal pronoun and doesn’t have the same restriction.

> On Jan 5, 2015, at 9:34 AM, Jane Saral <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> A recent SAT "ID the error" question reads:
>
> Although it is widely regarded as a masterpiece now, when it was built
>                             A                                                  B
>
> the Eiffel Tower was compared to a "ridiculous smokestack" by them who did
>                                                                                             C
>
> not approve of it.        No error
>             D                       E
>
>
> C just sounds wrong.  I would say "by those who did not approve of it."  But isn't the "them/those" word the stand-alone O.P. of by, unaffected by the relative clause that follows?  This does not seem to be dealing with the who/whom question;  "who" is correctly the subject of "did not approve."
>
> So why is this an error?
>
> Jane Saral
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