Whom is not dead?

What is it about?

This article reviews some of the recent literature on the ongoing discussion about the use of whom in spoken and written English. Some linguists claim that whom is artificially kept alive by prescriptive grammarians, and that it has virtually disappeared from the spoken language. Investigations of the occurrence of whom in a number of recent English corpora show its continuing use in various text categories, especially the more formal types of writing, although it is by no means confined to writing. Its chief syntactic function is that of complement to a preposition, most notably in the construction of whom when postmodifying an NP headed by a numeral or a quantifier. Almost one fifth of all occurrences o/whom are of this type.

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