the relative pronoun "whose"?

[Casiopea]

EX: It was John who went.
=> "who" refers to John. "John" is the grammatical subject; "It", the structural subject. With expletive-It constructs, the subject (i.e., John) is delayed.

EX: It is John and Mary who are going.
=> "are" agrees in number with "who", which gets its number from its referent "John and Mary".

All the best.

[dihen]

_

[dihen]

Are resumptive adverbs also ungrammatical, like in this? :
`
"I'm going to the Netherlands, where I'll stay there for a week."

[zahari]

Originally Posted by dihen

Really? You really never ever have heard these ones?:
"the child that his mother is a teacher"
"the book that some of its pages are missing"
"the boy that I visited her sister"

I've heard sentences like these ones from students whose mother tongue is Greek. This is because a sentence like "the child that his mother is a teacher..." if translated word for word in Greek, is grammatically correct and widely used.

[MrPedantic]

Originally Posted by dihen

Are resumptive adverbs also ungrammatical, like in this? :
`
"I'm going to the Netherlands, where I'll stay there for a week."

Hello Dihen

I would think of them as "unidiomatic in standard English".

If you were a copy-editor on a magazine, for instance, you would edit them out. (Unless they appeared in direct speech, and you wanted to retain them for the sake of "local colour".)

All the best,
MrP

[dihen]

Are these also incorrect?
`
"people that I expect them to be there"
"people that you think that they never fail"

[MrPedantic]

Hello Dihen

It's possible that in some dialects of English, those constructions would be used; but they would both be "incorrect" in standard English, unfortunately!

Instead, you would say:

1. "...people that I expect to be there..."
2. "...people that you think never fail"

All the best,

MrP

[dihen]

Are these acceptable?
`
"the child that the mother is a teacher of"
"the book that some pages are missing of"
"the boy that I visited the sister of"

[Tdol]

'Whose' would be the natural choice in all of those for me.

[BobK]

Originally Posted by dihen

Are these acceptable?
`
"the child that the mother is a teacher of"
"the book that some pages are missing of"
"the boy that I visited the sister of"

As a native speaker of British English I'd accept the first and third in speech (perhaps because the possessor is a person), and for the second I'd say "The book that has some pages missing" (or "...some missing pages").

b

ps 'whose' would also be fine in all three - it would just sound to me a bit too correct!