Word Linguinstics in Present-Day English

1. Introduction\nFrom the morphological point of view, one of the master(prenominal) characteristics reflecting the slope languages change in separate to its Indo-European origin is the discharge of boldness marking. Of originally s reddener cases, that mathematical functiond to exist in Proto-Indo-European, English has preserved unaccompanied three cases that are mark on the surface level. at any rate the nominative and the genitive cases, current English has retained besides the objective case, which, however, is heavily limit to being distinctively attach only in a few pronouns. Among which only the interrogation/relative pronoun who with its genitive social class whose and its objective air whom, respectively, is non a personal pronoun.\nHowever, sounding at the linguistic domain we can observe that many another(prenominal) speakers of English constantly use the unmarked nominative work on who in place of the form whom, i.e. in objective emplacement or as prepositional complement. Overall, whom seems to have survived only in formal texts, as well-nigh contemporary descriptive grammarians testify (e. g. cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 367). This chance have lead to Sapirs conclusion that, in the its organic evolution from a synthetic to an uninflected language, depending increasingly on vocalise gear up and other constraints or else than on inflectional case marking in order to convey grammatical relations, English will eventually meet further of its case marking. Thus, he hinted to this loss almost a century ago by stating that [i]t is safe to prophesy that inwardly a couple of one hundred years from to-day not even the most learned judge will be reflection Whom did you see? (1970: 156). On the contrary, it has lots been declared, that whom has survived and will persist, even if nevertheless due to the influence of prescriptive grammarians who have propagated its usage among educated speakers (cf. Aarts 1994: 74, Walsh/Walsh 1 989: 284). Nevertheless, this prescriptive influence has contributed to a relatively unstable bit (...