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Examples
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"Our mantra is we'll work with whoever's in charge."
Companies may have to make amends after midterm elections Ylan Q. Mui 2010
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"Our mantra is we'll work with whoever's in charge."
Companies may have to make amends after midterm elections Ylan Q. Mui 2010
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Even when you really really mean it, even when you know whoever's saying it to you has only the best intentions, the line -- "that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger" -- just feels kinda lame.
Barbara & Shannon Kelley: No, Really! Whatever Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger Barbara 2011
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There's usually a fair amount of drinking involved with this, although there might not be if whoever's going out is young (under 15), middle-aged, or pregnant.
Weekend drinking 2009
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Deschamps can play on that and tell whoever's directly up against Patrice to wind him up as much as he can until he snaps and eventually is booked.
Patrice Evra set for stormy Champions League reception at Marseille 2011
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Even when you really really mean it, even when you know whoever's saying it to you has only the best intentions, the line -- "that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger" -- just feels kinda lame.
Barbara & Shannon Kelley: No, Really! Whatever Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger Barbara 2011
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They drove, in whoever's car was the best at the time over 600 miles to a hunting shack they owned and paid a locale farmer to watch over and stock with food just before their arrival.
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They drove, in whoever's car was the best at the time over 600 miles to a hunting shack they owned and paid a locale farmer to watch over and stock with food just before their arrival.
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There's usually a fair amount of drinking involved with this, although there might not be if whoever's going out is young (under 15), middle-aged, or pregnant.
Weekend drinking 2009
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Without ANY public option, the "new healthcare" is the same as the old healthcare – except that money currently earmarked for Medicare and Medicaid will be up for grabs for whoever's favorite pork project.
John King's Monday Memo: Will retailers deliver good news? 2009
qroqqa commented on the word whoever's
Fascinating sentence: The insurer tries to recover what it can from whoever's fault it was. While probably ungrammatical, it's close to something that is grammatical and it's worth investigating why.
Let's take a fully grammatical counterpart: ... from whoever is at fault. (The fact that this is can be contracted to give whoever's might have influenced the original sentence too.) In this, whoever is a fused relative. It is simultaneously head of the noun phrase whoever is at fault, which is complement of the preposition from, and subject of the verb phrase is at fault.
In from whoever's fault it was, the whoever again heads the NP that's the complement of from, namely whoever's fault it was. But instead of being subject of a verb phrase, it's determiner of the nominal fault it was. (This nominal consists of a head noun and a relative clause modifying it.)
We need to hand-wave over whether it's whoever or genitive whoever's that's head and/or determiner—the structural status of 's is unresolved amongst linguists anyway. This aside, we have a parallel: both subject and determiner are specifiers of their respective phrases.
In both cases also the fused head can be unpacked into a complement NP with a modifying relative clause headed by a separate relative pronoun: from him whose fault it was; from him who is at fault. Thus it seems to me quite natural to produce the original sentence, and though I have to mark it as ungrammatical for my own speech, it quite possibly wasn't for the original speaker.
June 19, 2009