Grammar Question - Who v.s. Whose

Pjesse
Thu, 17 Oct 2013 02:57:41 +0000

rowerruns:



Two related examples come to mind:

I am the person who likes to

I am the person whose arm is …

I didn’t know if from there it could be generalized that in this type of construction in which whose is not the first word, would a noun always follow whose but a noun would never follow who?



I think so. I’m not too sure, but I you read the sentence out loud you’ll notice if there’s something wrong. In your second example, notice that ‘whose’ is a term used to claim the ‘arm’ as well as a predicate pronoun (I’ll explain what that neans). In your first example however, ‘who’ is not showing any ownership at all and is only a predicate pronoun. A predicate pronoun is a pronoun (or noun) that comes after the verb but means the same thing as the subject. It’s used to form a complete thought, in a way.

Uhm, did this help? I don want to tell you something that I’m not sure of, so I’m not going to claim that ‘who’ is always followed by a verb or ‘whose’ is always followed by a noun.