連鎖関係詞節の現状 : The British National Corpusの用例をもとに

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You feed children who you think are hungry. (who-clause)You feed children whom you think are hungry. (whom-clause)You feed children you think are hungry. (contact clause)\nThere have been various discussions about what is called a "concatenated relative clause." One of the most controversial issues is that a grammatically incorrect deviant, "whom-clause" is fairly often used, besides a grammatically correct deviant, "who-clause." Swan (1995) refers to the whom-clause as "not generally considered correct." However, immediately following, after showing the example "This is a letter from my father, whom we hope will be out of hospital soon.", he refers to the who-clause as "more correct." This description seems to accept that the whom-clause is also correct, and therefore seems to be inconsistent with "not generally considered correct." Huddleston & Pullum (2002) writes of the whom-clause that it "has to be accepted as an established variant of the standard language." These two studies do not refer to a "contact clause," or the frequency of each concatenated relative clause. Indeed, no study to date refers to the frequency of each clause, or their frequency in written English and spoken English.The purpose of this paper is to clarify the frequency of the whom-clause in current English, compared to the frequency of the who-clause and the contact clause. Examples of each clause are retrieved from The British National Corpus (BNC). The frequency of each clause in written English and spoken English will also be clarified.