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Double jeopardy.
When I got to the office this morning Daisy, who is one of the English teachers and works in the International Office, was grilling Row about this sentence:
I felt vaguely uncomfortable when I read the sentence and knew that the problem had something to do with "their doctors say". Remove that phrase and see what you get. Yup. The sentence is ungrammatical because there's a relative pronoun missing. It should read "...conditions which their doctors say are beyond hope".
This is an instance of two phenomena in English. One is an instance of hypercorrection which occurs when some clause introducing reported speech (which has its own subject) is inserted into a sentence at a point where a subject relative pronoun should occur. Often, though, instead of inserting "who", some writers being familiar with the use of "whom" will insert the oblique form of the relative pronoun into the sentence because of the presence of the the subject of the verb of reported speech. In other words, you get sentences like this:
where "who" would be grammatically correct. That's the first half of the story.
But in English we can omit the relative pronoun when it's the dO of its clause. Thus
What happened in the first sentence is that these two things have come together. It's been assumed that "which" is functioning as the dO of the relative clause because of the presence of the clause of reported speech and can, therefore, be omitted.
These days I have a tendency to separate off clauses of reported speech with commas to indicate that these things are intrusive in the sentence.
This is your actual native speaker English and comes from a VoA news report.
When I got to the office this morning Daisy, who is one of the English teachers and works in the International Office, was grilling Row about this sentence:
Terri Schiavo was among at least ten thousand Americans with conditions their doctors say are beyond hope.
I felt vaguely uncomfortable when I read the sentence and knew that the problem had something to do with "their doctors say". Remove that phrase and see what you get. Yup. The sentence is ungrammatical because there's a relative pronoun missing. It should read "...conditions which their doctors say are beyond hope".
This is an instance of two phenomena in English. One is an instance of hypercorrection which occurs when some clause introducing reported speech (which has its own subject) is inserted into a sentence at a point where a subject relative pronoun should occur. Often, though, instead of inserting "who", some writers being familiar with the use of "whom" will insert the oblique form of the relative pronoun into the sentence because of the presence of the the subject of the verb of reported speech. In other words, you get sentences like this:
I was reading about Queen Victoria whom they say was afraid of chickens.
where "who" would be grammatically correct. That's the first half of the story.
But in English we can omit the relative pronoun when it's the dO of its clause. Thus
The farmer whom Queen Victoria feared was waiting with his flock of chickens. OR
The farmer Queen Victoria feared was waiting with his flock of chickens.
What happened in the first sentence is that these two things have come together. It's been assumed that "which" is functioning as the dO of the relative clause because of the presence of the clause of reported speech and can, therefore, be omitted.
These days I have a tendency to separate off clauses of reported speech with commas to indicate that these things are intrusive in the sentence.
This is your actual native speaker English and comes from a VoA news report.
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