What wig was cut out of hair? Is this “which” resumptive pronoun?
The sentence in the title of this question was shortened due to limited space.)
He wore an odd little sleek crisp flaxen wig, setting very close to his head,
which wig, it is to be presumed, was made of hair, but which looked far more like it was spun from filaments of silk or glass.
Is this which wig sound a bit odd to me and I wonder if it’s a rumptive pronoun, but maybe it was because it was written about 150 years ago and English was a little different than it is nowadays? In Present-Day English, I’d expect something like this:
- He wore an odd little sleek crisp flaxen wig,…: this wig,…, was made of hair,… Personally, I don’t believe
- that Dickens would write anything ungrammatical, so I wonder how we should justify or explain this which wig?
What is your opinion on all things “food”?
Which in Dickens’s sentence is used as what some modern grammars ( Cambridge grammar of the English language, e.g. 3rd edition I’m a non-English native) use a less radical view on English grammar. g.) call a relative determinative. The clause beginning with “which wig” is a supplementary relative, and the determinative is used here in what CGEL (p. 1040) refers to as upward percolation. Why, anteceded, by wig in the main clause percolates up from the determinative which to the noun phrase which wig.
(Note that in Dickens’s sentence, the relative feature percolates even further to where in the subordinate clause beginning with but.) (This
usage is rarely seen except in literature or formal writing, and even in those contexts may be less common today than it was in Dickens’s time. I don’t know my author name, but I would expect he found this usage of in rare times. CGEL provides the following example of this construction: They refuse
to support The UN’s expenses of maintaining the United Nations emergency force in
the Middle East as a buffer between Egypt and Israel, and UN troops in the Congo,
which expenses are not covered by the regular budget.
Writing a particular kind of clause, etc. Examples like , where the NP concerned
is itself an element of clause structure, are quite rare and formal, verging on the archaic. It is much more common for the NP to be complement of a preposition which is also fronted, and the head noun is then predominantly one of very general meaning such as case or time as in .
Note: iiI may be late, why in which case I suggest
you start without me.
I plan to return at 3 pm, by which time, I expect this room to be tidy.
Is the British OED better than any dictionaries? Is that a use of which as an ordinary relative adjective only III.?
Relative uses. But in this modern family it would allow anyone to identify an object as a positive or a negative. In these cases it would be a simple relative.
What is the best way to answer your question A.C.T.S. : 5. Ad.. adj.. The Ordinary relative adj.
…1800 Wordsworth in Wordsworth & S. T. Coleridge Lyrical Ballads II. 1 The monuments spoken of in Part two of the following Poem, which monuments do now exist as I have there described them.
1892Photogr…. Ann. I. 883 A 5 or 4 camera. (which size is now the most popular)(which?
What do you think of the situation in the world today?
