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rhinocharge64
Joined: 20 Sep 2006
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 Posted: Thu May 10, 2007 9:54 pm Post subject: Grammar question |
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Could you please advise on the following sentence.
These consumers, all of them/whom are heavily in debt, require financial assistance.
The correct to use would be whom and not them. My qusetion is why? Any feedback would be thoroughly appreciated.
Regards The Charge |
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Woland
Joined: 10 May 2006
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Fri May 11, 2007 6:24 am Post subject: Re: Grammar question |
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| rhinocharge64 wrote: |
Could you please advise on the following sentence.
These consumers, all of them/whom are heavily in debt, require financial assistance.
The correct to use would be whom and not them. My qusetion is why? Any feedback would be thoroughly appreciated.
Regards The Charge |
The use of 'whom' here as a relative pronoun makes the clause it is in dependent, and thus indicates its lowered informational importance in comparison to the independent clause, "These consumers require financial assistance." That proposition is what the speaker is really focusing on.
Using 'them' would mean that you were embedding an independent clause within another independent clause, something which, technically, is not allowed in a single sentence. The rule is, one independent clause in any complex sentence (compound sentences involving conjunctions are a different matter).
That said, we might hear someone say the utterance with two independent clauses. If they did, I would expect to see it rendered in writing using dashes:
These consumers -- all of them are heavily in debt -- require financial assistance
to show that the second independent clause is not truly embedded, but is an interruption, a tangent, from the main point. The extra information is being raised in status, but still treated as separate from the main proposition. There would be a pause where the dashes are in speech, and the sentence within them would carry normal statement ((rise-)fall) intonation.
A third possibility exists, use of an appositive construction:
These consumers, all of them heavily in debt, require financial assistance
In this construction the material between commas has been reduced from a clause to a phrase (it contains no finite, tensed verb, which is necessary for a clause). This reduces its informational importance even below the use of the relative clause (phrases are less important than clauses) and makes it truly an aside, extra information given to the listener, but not considered essential by the writer/speaker. This kind of construction has a unique fall(-rise) intonation pattern which marks it in speech.
I hope this helps. |
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J.B. Clamence
Joined: 15 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Fri May 11, 2007 7:06 am Post subject: |
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^
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what he said |
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rhinocharge64
Joined: 20 Sep 2006
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| Posted: Sun May 13, 2007 5:55 pm Post subject: |
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Cheers Woland thanks for your reply, it's truly appreciated.
Regards The Charge |
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