[Grammar] Once upon a time, a king offered a prize to whoever painted the best picture of peace

[kite]

Hi teachers,

"Once upon a time, a king offered a prize to whoever painted the best picture of peace." In this sentence if I use "whomever" instead of "whoever", am I wrong?

Thanks.

 

[MikeNewYork]

Hi teachers,

"Once upon a time, a king offered a prize to whoever painted the best picture of peace." In this sentence if I use "whomever" instead of "whoever", am I wrong?

Thanks.

Yes, that would be wrong. In the original sentence, ""whoever" is the subject of a clause and it needs the nominative version.

 

[kite]

I thought that in a sentence after 'to' it is always should be an object. Just knew that subject is also okay to be used. It is new to me.

 

[MikeNewYork]

I thought that in a sentence after 'to' it is always should be an object. Just knew that subject is also okay to be used. It is new to me.

Yes, this is the trickiest part of using who/whom. If the pronoun is the object of a preposition, we use the objective form. But in this case, the clause is the object of a preposition and the pronoun is the subject of a clause.

 

[5jj]

Yes, this is the trickiest part of using who/whom. If the pronoun is the object of a preposition, we use the objective form. But in this case, the clause is the object of a preposition and the pronoun is the subject of a clause.

That's a good one. Thank you.

Before Rover steps in to say I should simply click on 'Like', I'll add that I have tried to respond to this question before and not come up with such an obvious (once you see it) answer. It's worth a boost, in my opinion.

ps. My usual response has been that native speakers of BrE rarely use 'whomever;' even when it's 'grammatically correct'. I haven't changed my mind about that.