Whomever

Question

Which of these is correct?I will give the money to whomever gets me out of here. I will give the money to whoever gets me out of here.I can't tell if it's saying "give to him" or "he gets me out".

Usenet · Accepted Answer

[nq:1]Which of these is correct? I will give the money to whomever gets me out of here. I will give the money to whoever gets me out of here. I can't tell if it's saying "give to him" or "he gets me out".[/nq]
It's the second.
"Whoever" is correct because it is the subject of the dependent clause that contains it. The entire dependent clause, not the pronoun "who(m)ever," is the object of the preposition "to." A pronoun in a dependent clause takes its case from its function in the clause.
Here's an example where the pronoun is the object in the clause and therefore in the objective case: "I will give the money to whomever he chooses." "Whomever" there is the direct object of "he chooses" within the dependent clause. The dependent clause is again the object of "to," but "whomever" is objective because of its role in the clause, not because it follows "to."
As the usage of "whom" slowly fades from the language, this distinction will eventually lose its significance. But it hasn't done so yet.

Bob Lieblich
Whatever

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]Which of these is correct? I will give the money ... it's saying "give to him" or "he gets me out".[/nq]
[nq:1]It's the second. "Whoever" is correct because it is the subject of the dependent clause that contains it. The entire ... of "whom" slowly fades from the language, this distinction will eventually lose its significance. But it hasn't done so yet.[/nq]
I am often awestruck by the rules of language and how usage develops from an arcane logic that must be genetically based, because if not forced by nature no one would speak in such a way.

Usenet · Answer

I will give the money to him. (but)
I will give the money to WHOEVER (not whomever) gets me out of here.

These are parallel situations only up to a point. The object of the preposition "to" is what follows it - a word (pronoun) in the first case, but a complete clause in the second. In this clause, "whoever" is the subject, and must be in nominative case. The fact that the entire clause serves as the object of a preposition (parallel to the objective pronoun "him" in the first sentence) is immaterial.

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]Which of these is correct? I will give the money ... it's saying "give to him" or "he gets me out".[/nq]
That's the official answer, and it's certainly the answer that we should give to anyone facing the prospect of an examination in English. Still, I'm not convinced that it's the complete answer.

"To whoever" is, in the present example, the officially correct answer. On the other hand, "to whomever" is what you're most likely to hear from a native speaker. The combination "to whom" is so solidly frozen in our minds that it acts as a unit.

It's generally held that native speakers do some sort of mental parsing when constructing sentences like this. That may well be true in languages where inflections are used to distinguish noun cases. By now the notion of "case" is somewhat foreign to English speakers, and it's not clear that most would analyse the given example as having a clause as the object of a preposition. (The people who know about, and fully understand, that sort of distinction would add up to a small minority of native speakers.) I have the impression that English speakers are moving away from concepts like parse trees for a context-free grammar which was, in any case, only ever a crude approximation to reality and more towards rules where the inflections latch on to the nearest available word.
Given that "to whom" remains a fixed combination in our vocabulary, I expect the "to whoever" version to fade away, with "whomever" used after "to" regardless of whether it acts as a subject or an object.

Peter Moylan
Flexing his brown arms

Whomever

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