In the news this past week, I read of someone quoted as saying, Whomever did something like that should be punished to the full extent of the law. If we agree that using our ear to test questions of grammar is not a reliable way to proceed, we can agree that our trained ear will alert us to potential problems—to which we can then apply our knowledge of grammar in order to accept or reject confidently a construction we’ve encountered. With this example, many of us will probably wonder whether whomever did something like that is correct, but how would our grammatical analysis proceed?
Always, always, the first step in analysis is to isolate the sample (as clinical as that may sound in matters literary), and here that would mean to recognize that the remark we’re examining constitutes one sentence of two clauses: Whomever did something like that and should be punished to the full extent of the law. The latter clause raises no real question of correctness (we’ll identify its missing subject momentarily), so our next step in analytical procedure is to isolate the sample one step further and put only the first clause under the microscope. Now we can begin to consider it in earnest.
Every clause, by definition, has a subject and a verb, whether each is explicitly stated or implicitly present. The verb of the first clause is the simple past tense did; it is a transitive verb, which means that the pronoun something is its direct object, the prepositional phrase like that simply completing the predicate. The word whomever, then, is the word that apparently alerted us to a potential problem, and in looking at its form, we see whom + ever, which together make up what is called an indefinite relative pronoun. The nomenclature shouldn’t confuse us: indefinite just means it is referring to someone unknown or undefined, and relative means it derives from the more common relative pronouns who, whose, whom. Whomever, then, is an abbreviated way of saying one whom or anyone whom.
The indefinite relative pronoun whomever has, however, a related form it works with: whoever, and so the question we are testing is the difference between these two forms. Pronouns are the one department where grammatical case still appears most elaborately. Case refers here to the change in spelling a pronoun undergoes to mark its grammatical function in a particular sentence. The spelling whomever indicates that the pronoun is in the objective case, which means it must be the object of some transitive verb or preposition. Whoever, by contrast, indicates the nominative case, which is the form the pronoun assumes when it stands as the subject of a clause. With that information, we have all we need to know to bring this first clause to a correct appraisal.
The verb of a clause, of course, requires a subject. A subject precedes its verb in a standard declarative statement, and so in the construction whomever did, the pronoun whomever must be standing in the place of the subject. But as we have just observed, whomever is the objective form of that pronoun, not the nominative, and we need the latter form to make the subject. Thus, whoever did that is the grammatically correct formulation, with whomever did that impossible to justify here on any ground, grammatical or rhetorical (although the mistaken choice might have been made on the mistaken belief that whom always elevates the diction, and therefore the authority, of a statement).
As to our outstanding question of just what the subject of the second clause is, we should remember that subjects do not only appear as individual words, but that an entire clause may serve as a subject. That is what is happening here. The subject of the verb phrase should be punished is the entire preceding clause, whoever did something like that: the person, whoever it might have been, who did something like that is the person who should be punished to the full extent of the law. The pronoun whoever must be in the nominative case for reasons its own clause requires, but the entire clause, whose case is not indicated in any way other than by analysis, stands as the subject of the second clause.
And that should remind us of an ever-present danger in close analysis like this (and indeed more largely in life). We might look so closely that we miss the forest for the trees, in which case just stepping back a few mental paces and regarding the sentence in its entirety will often suggest a new line of investigation.
***