Who/whom antecedent -- closest person, or closest noun?

slhuang said:

I should just leave the original and let my editor flag it if necessary

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I read it the way you intended it, because wouldn't a fridge be a "that", not a "who"?

I would leave it to the editor to decide too, although SWest's change is better anyway, in my opinion.

Belinda is right. "Who" and "whom" refer to people not to inanimate objects or animals; although some people think of some animals as people.

"...saw a pair of stumpy legs sprawled over the ceramic tile and attached to a woman, slumped against the refrigerator, who was not Sonya Halliday."

King Neptune said:

Belinda is right. "Who" and "whom" refer to people not to inanimate objects or animals; although some people think of some animals as people.

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I think it's a matter of whether the animal is being treated as a being, individual, or character in the narrative or not, or if it's (as I did just here) being treated as a sort of indistinct prop or automaton in the setting.

A generic dog, for instance might be an it and a that, not a he/she or a who/whom.

But a dog with a name and a personality is a he/she and a who/whom most definitely, except perhaps in the most formal and distant of narrative styles.

The dog, which is brown, is barking.

Wiley, who is brown, is barking.

The convention (in English, at least) of animals being treated as inanimate objects instead of beings with gender and personality arose (I'm guessing) from the now-discredited idea that they are soulless automatons with no consciousness or subjective experiences of their own existence.

This is a pretty strange idea to most English speakers these days. I remember being at a vet clinic once and a woman was there with an adorable puppy (who was male). She was talking to the technicians about the dog's vaccine schedule and so on, and the weirdest thing was she kept referring the the little guy (her own pet) as "it."

"So I should bring it in again in four weeks for the next booster?" etc.

It was really strange, and everyone in the waiting room was staring at her, and the technicians kept referring to the puppy as "he" and frowning uncertainly during the conversation. It's the only time I've ever witnessed someone referring to their own animal as an "it." Though when I was a kid I had a friend whose dad could never keep the gender of their family dog straight (went back and forth between calling him "he" and "she.")

Maryn said:

To my eye, it's kind of ungainly even if it's correct. There are lots of ways to make it "gainly."

...sprawled over the ceramic tile, a pair of stumpy legs attached to a woman, slumped against the refrigerator, who was not Sonya Halliday."
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That's the full answer, but the OP didn't ask that one. I would change it even more, but it's also a matter of style.

I understood your original sentence exactly as you intended it the first time I read it. Unless you're writing a Brave Little Toaster story, appliances are thats, not whos.

You might ask your beta whether s/he misunderstood the sentence or was merely concerned that other readers might. It would surprise me if any readers would parse it the way your beta suggests, but perhaps your beta is a surprising person.

If you feel the need to disambiguate, I would go with the commas guttersquid suggested rather than moving the phrase.

SWest said:

"...saw a pair of stumpy legs sprawled over the ceramic tile, attached to a woman slumped against the refrigerator. A woman who was not Sonya Halliday."



buzhi, my sweet!

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Now you've done it! You've added a Sentence Fragment!

That must be why I liked it hehe

If you feel uncertain about the relationship of noun to referencing pronoun, you probably have a sentence structure problem. Find a clearer way to express what you intend.

caw

Grammatically, it's ambiguous; it could refer to either. "Who" does not work like "she" attaching to "the nearest". But "slumped against the refrigerator" is long enough that the reader is going to forget the possibility of attaching it to anything before that. "A woman in a skirt who was not Sonya Halliday" doesn't get read as a skirt not being Sonya, because "in a skirt" is short enough. You can make sentences that are grammatically correct that yet are bad because they strain a reader's short term memory.

You might get rid of the ambiguity by using the phrase "unknown woman" and removing "who was not Sonya Halliday".

"...saw a pair of stumpy legs sprawled over the ceramic tile, attached to an unknown woman slumped against the refrigerator."

I quite like the idea of a refrigerator not called Sonya Halliday. We can speculate on what it might have been called.

But to be serious a mo, the words 'slumped against the refrigerator' in the OP surely constitute an adjectival phrase, making it tolerably clear that they describe the woman and not the fridge. Purely as a matter of interest, here in Bulgaria where they speak Bulgarian that phrase would typically be put before 'woman', so it would read 'a slumped against the refrigerator woman who was not Sonya Halliday'. It's a commonly to be encountered error )) in translation from Bulgarian into English, though I've often thought it a pity that, with some limited exceptions, we're not allowed to do that.

The refridgerator woman was a monster in Doctor Who, I think.

apchelopech said:

I quite like the idea of a refrigerator not called Sonya Halliday. We can speculate on what it might have been called.

But to be serious a mo, the words 'slumped against the refrigerator' in the OP surely constitute an adjectival phrase, making it tolerably clear that they describe the woman and not the fridge. Purely as a matter of interest, here in Bulgaria where they speak Bulgarian that phrase would typically be put before 'woman', so it would read 'a slumped against the refrigerator woman who was not Sonya Halliday'. It's a commonly to be encountered error )) in translation from Bulgarian into English, though I've often thought it a pity that, with some limited exceptions, we're not allowed to do that.

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It is permissible for you to call a refrigerator Sonya Halliday if you wish to.