A recent development in spoken American English is the supersedure of what used to be reserved for non-human antecedents in the reference of the relative pronoun which by its human counterpart who. In listening to radio transmissions one discovers the increasing use of who where only which previously obtained as grammatically correct, e.g. “the companies who” or “the financial corporation who” instead of “the companies which” and “the financial corporation which,” as a recognition of the plurality of the collectivity’s members. Cf. this example from a recent New York Times column (quoting Judith Kipper): “‘Do you have confidence that the banks, who helped to create the problem . . .'” (Joe Nocera, “‘Nice’ Wasn’t Part of the Deal,” The New York Times, National Edition, August 1, 2009, p. B1).

This widespread phenomenon could be analyzed simply as a change of focus in relative pronominal reference from the inanimate grammatical property of the collective noun to the human agents that constitute the actors making the abstract noun come to life, so to speak. This is akin to the British usage whereby grammatically singular collectives like family or team are referred to by plural pronouns and plural number in verb conjugation (cf. American “the family is coming to dinner” vs. British “the family are coming to dinner,” etc.). It is further supported by the neutralization of the opposition between human and non-human in the possessive pronoun whose; thus both “the people whose faces” and “the faces whose outlines” are both normative.

But a more comprehensive analysis that trades in axiological (value) considerations can also be essayed, providing a possibly deeper understanding of the linguistic change. Since referring to an inanimate (specifically: non-human) object with the relative pronoun reserved for human antecedents is a kind of personification, one could just as well say that words like company or corporation which induce the phenomenon at issue have come to be regarded grammatically as human, making this a reflection of the underlying change in their value status. They are no longer impersonal agents denoted by abstract nouns but simulacra of human actors with the power over real human beings, construed heretofore as wielded only by the latter. Accordingly, this shift in pronominal usage in the twenty-first century would ultimately be seen as the sign of a nascent reinterpretation––both ideologically and in the grammar of American English (at least)––of the speech community’s evaluation of the notional structure of social reality.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO

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