Relative Pronouns as Predicatives: Evidence from Shakespearean English

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn his Modern English Grammar, Otto Jespersen declared that the relative pronoun who cannot be used as a predicative. He further stated that which is the correct form for the function. To support this argument, he provides evidence from texts of the middle nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To date, the use of predicative relatives before the eighteenth century has received little attention and no research on this topic has been conducted for Early Modern English. To fill this gap, this article focuses on the use of predicative relatives in Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays, revealing that which had been established as the ordinary form of the predicative relative in Shakespeare’s English. Although there exists one exceptional case of using whom in Cymbeline, by collating folio and quarto texts and looking into revisions of eighteenth century adaptations, it is concluded that Jespersen’s argument applies to Early Modern English as well.