Whom은 얼마나 더 생존할까?

This article considers how long whom will survive as an interrogative or relative pronoun. We will make a strong argument that whom is a complete stylistic variant of who (or a diglossic variant, à la Kaye(1991)). In other words, whom can be replaced by who in all cases in a less formal situation (or in an acrolectic dialect). This argument is based on the examination of a questionnaire presented to the English native professors of Keimyung University. They judged as natural or acceptable all the constructions with who instead of the prescriptively expected whom. They even accepted the pied-piping construction like the person to who I talked or To who did you talk?, which is regarded as the only environment where whom is obligatory. Nevertheless, we could find only a few examples of such pied-piping construction in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. We interpret, like Quirk et al.(1985: 368), that this rarity is due to the formality mismatch between the highly formal pied-piping construction and the informal who, not to any syntactic constraint. We will think, like Kaye(1991), that the pied-piping construction and the informal who are used in different dialects, the former in an acrolect and the latter in a mesolect or basilect. Therefore, the future survival of whom will be governed by sociolinguistic considerations, not by syntactic factors any more