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fumi
Joined: 23 Aug 2014
Posts: 12
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 Posted: Thu Sep 03, 2015 12:13 am Post subject: which or whose? |
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Dear teachers,
I am sorry to ask many questions at once, but I am trying to find out about relative pronouns, and in Japan, people's comments are not uniform.
Could you tell me which is correct?
That is a house whose roof I repaired yesterday.
or
That is a house which roof I repaired yesterday.
Is it have to be
"That is a house the roof of which I repaired yesterday."
when you use "which" instead of "whose"?
Thank you very much!
Fumi |
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Lorikeet
Joined: 08 Oct 2005
Posts: 1877
Location: San Francisco
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| Posted: Sat Sep 05, 2015 10:38 pm Post subject: Re: which or whose? |
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| fumi wrote: |
Dear teachers,
I am sorry to ask many questions at once, but I am trying to find out about relative pronouns, and in Japan, people's comments are not uniform.
Could you tell me which is correct?
That is a house whose roof I repaired yesterday.
or
That is a house which roof I repaired yesterday.
Is it have to be
"That is a house the roof of which I repaired yesterday."
when you use "which" instead of "whose"?
Thank you very much!
Fumi |
There's no limit on the questions you can ask. And you may get different answers from different people too!
First, I would use "the" and not "a". "That is the house whose roof I fixed." However, that is pretty informal because actually a house isn't a person. I would rather say, "That is the man whose roof I fixed." or "That is the house where I fixed the roof." to avoid that construction. "The roof of which" does not sound good to me. |
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SimpleEnglishBlogger
Joined: 01 Feb 2011
Posts: 50
Location: Japan
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| Posted: Fri Dec 18, 2015 6:51 am Post subject: |
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| Lorikeet wrote: |
| fumi wrote: |
Dear teachers,
I am sorry to ask many questions at once, but I am trying to find out about relative pronouns, and in Japan, people's comments are not uniform.
Could you tell me which is correct?
That is a house whose roof I repaired yesterday.
or
That is a house which roof I repaired yesterday.
Is it have to be
"That is a house the roof of which I repaired yesterday."
when you use "which" instead of "whose"?
Thank you very much!
Fumi |
There's no limit on the questions you can ask. And you may get different answers from different people too!
First, I would use "the" and not "a". "That is the house whose roof I fixed." However, that is pretty informal because actually a house isn't a person. I would rather say, "That is the man whose roof I fixed." or "That is the house where I fixed the roof." to avoid that construction. "The roof of which" does not sound good to me. |
"That is a house whose roof I repaired yesterday" is correct.
As for "That is a house the roof of which I repaired yesterday," I have never heard this construction. Is this what they're teaching? I just checked Google and see that there are some people advocating it but it sounds really awkward and frankly, I don't consider it acceptable. And I stress, I have never, not even once, heard a native speaker say anything like this.
Whose doesn't need to refer to a person. We use it to refer to inanimate objects like this all the time.
Using "the" instead of "a"... That depends on the speaker's intent. If the speaker fixed several houses' roofs and he's pointing out one of them, then "a" would be correct. Using "the" connotes that he only fixed that one house's roof.
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