About This Project

I investigate a rare English construction where the relative pronoun whose appears without a following noun. I need acceptability judgments from native speakers to determine when & why this construction is felt grammatical. Corpus analysis + experimental data will show how grammar works. I predict these constructions are acceptable only when context provides the missing noun: an apparent grammar rule is just a pragmatic constraint.

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What is the context of this research?

For decades, grammars of English have repeated the claim – due to Hankamer & Postal (1973) – that English can’t use relative whose without a following noun (e.g., the team whose was on time); later work noted exceptions, and occasional real-world examples keep popping up, including in the Oxford English Dictionary's entry for whose, leaving people split between “that’s just a mistake” and “it works in the right setup.” Most claims so far rest on anecdotes, introspection, or scattered web hits, none of which tell us how ordinary readers actually respond when they see these sentences in context.

This project brings clarity with preregistered, reader-based experiments on Postily: we test sentences in supportive vs. unsupportive contexts and measure both acceptability and understanding. By moving from folklore to data, we provide a clean answer to a small but classic question about how English grammar interacts with context.

What is the significance of this project?

This study directly tests whether independent relative whose is syntactically impossible (generative prediction: categorical ban) or pragmatically constrained (functionalist prediction: acceptable when context supports recovery). The answer fundamentally tests relative credence in linguistics' two dominant theoretical frameworks – generative theory predicts categorical syntactic gaps, while functionalism predicts gradient pragmatic constraints.

By running preregistered tests with 600 native speakers, we move from expert intuition to quantitative evidence. Results will inform automated grammar checkers like Grammarly (which currently flag these as errors) and corpus linguists studying rare constructions. More broadly, this shows how a 50-year-old debate based on two constructed examples can be resolved with systematic experimental data. Backers help replace theoretical speculation with empirical adjudication between competing frameworks.

What are the goals of the project?

This project will test the core claim through preregistered studies measuring whether whose without a following noun is acceptable when context makes the missing word obvious. We will measure both acceptability ratings and comprehension accuracy to determine whether higher understanding correlates with greater acceptability. By comparing multiple contextual setups, we will identify which factors matter most. Results will be tested across different sentence positions and writing registers to ensure findings generalize. All materials, data, and analyses will be shared openly so others can replicate or extend the work. Results will be shared openly on OSF and LingBuzz, enabling replication and extension by other researchers testing similar pragmatic-syntactic interactions.