In Lynn Coady’s Giller-Prize-winning book Hellgoing, one of my editorial colleagues has spotted the following sentence:
She tried not to stare at Marco while he spoke to whomever he was speaking to, but she wasn’t succeeding.
Does that look quite right? Are you not quite sure? It’s the sort of sentence that you might not think much about unless you stop and look at it, but if you do stop and look at it it might start to drive you a little crazy.
So let’s go into this little Hell and take apart this sentence and see how it works.
Core subjects and verbs:
She tried . . . but she wasn’t succeeding.
Tried what?
…tried not to stare…
Not to stare at whom?
…not to stare at Marco…
I’ll abbreviate “She tried not to stare at Marco” as STNSM. It’s syntactically fine, I think we can agree.
Now: when?
STNSM while he spoke…
OK, spoke to whom?
…he spoke to X
where whoever X was, he was speaking to him.
So X was the person he was speaking to. Whoever that was.
Now here is how that plays out in that bit of the sentence. We need a relativizer:
…he spoke to {the person} {[relativizer] he was speaking to him}
What happens is that {the person} is replaced by the whole {[relativizer] he was speaking to him}.
The relativizer is “whoever” or, as the case may be, “whomever”:
…he spoke to {whoever {he was speaking to [him]}}
The “him” at the end moves up and merges with the relativizer, giving it accusative case (i.e., making it the object) (see the bottom of this post for more on this):
…he spoke to {whoever [+him] he was speaking to}
…he spoke to {whomever he was speaking to}
That’s where the confusion happens. The raising and merging into “whomever” is something that can confuse just about anyone until they learn about the underlying movements.
It could have been
…he spoke to the person to whom he was speaking
Then “the person” stays put and it happens this way:
…he spoke to {the person} [relativizer] he was speaking to {him}
The relativizer would become just “whom”, moved up from the end:
…he spoke to {the person} [whom] he was speaking to
But the “to” typically follows it up in this case:
…he spoke to {the person} [to whom] he was speaking
Notice there are two “to”s in both versions.
So let’s look at the whole sentence again and match the parts:
She tried not to stare at Marco while he spoke to whomever he was speaking to, but she wasn’t succeeding.
What are the verbs?
tried … (not) to stare … spoke (to) … was … speaking (to) … wasn’t … succeeding
The conjugated verbs have subjects:
She tried … he spoke … he was … she wasn’t
Let’s add the complements:
She tried not to stare
to stare at Marco
he spoke to whomever
whomever he was speaking to [him]
she wasn’t succeeding
There are also the conjunctions “while” and “but”, and that makes the whole thing.
She tried not to stare at Marco while he spoke to whomever he was speaking to, but she wasn’t succeeding.
So there are actually no surplus words. Each verb “speaking” requires a “to”: “spoke to” and “was speaking to”. Formal English often frowns on stranding the preposition at the end, but it’s always been an available feature of English; indeed, it requires less syntactic movement. Raising the preposition with its complement is a funny thing to do from a syntactic perspective, and linguists call it “pied piping” because it’s as though the object is a pied piper getting the preposition to come dancing along with it.
Most of that is of course rather complex and more than the average person is inclined to want to know. But editors aren’t average persons, so I have put it here for your enjoyment.
Now, here’s the bit more about the “whoever” becoming “whomever”: The reason “whoever” is “whomever” is because it’s merged with the “him”. The entire relative clause is the object, and the case doesn’t penetrate inside it. Here’s proof:
He looked at whoever was speaking to him.
It would not be correct to say “whomever was speaking to him” because the “was” requires a subject, and that is “whoever.”
As it happens, I talk about how case assignment doesn’t automatically percolate into phrases in my latest article on TheWeek.com, “‘You and I’ vs. ‘You and me’.”
Sesquiotica 