Posted yesterday at 7:00 p.m.
In reference works, one reads about whose that it is the most difficult relative pronoun to use correctly.
It’s that whose is the equivalent of a complement introduced by of. It is not used with ofas in the – faulty – phrase “That’s what it’s all about”.
You can rearrange your sentence in two ways, keeping the of, or removing it. You can write “That’s what it’s about” or “That’s what it’s about”. If we prefer to keep whose, we write “That’s what I’m talking about”. If we like it better ofwe also use the relative pronoun that. “That’s what I’m talking about. When this construction is used in the newspaper, readers often have the impression that they see a fault, but this is not the case. We can write “This is what the world needs” or “This is what the world needs”.
The relative pronoun whose replaces a name. You don’t write “It’s this writer I told you about”, but “It’s the writer I told you about”, because whose replace the name writer. As if we were saying: “I told you about this writer. »
To find out if our construction is faulty, we can replace whose by “from whom”. The phrase “It’s her who is in question” quickly appears to us to be faulty. It is she who is in question. It is about her.
Whose may cause us other problems. For example, when we use a possessive pronoun, superfluous since whose already marks possession. We thus write “The writer whose books I know”, and not “The writer whose books I know”.
It’s the same with the pronoun inthat whose also excludes. We write “I like the books she has published, of which I have read more than half”. We avoid writing: “I like the books she has published, of which I have read more than half”.
Finished or over?
At the beginning of the sentence, should we write “finished the war” or make the agreement, “finished the war”?
Answer
Both are possible. The use is floating.
According to The right use“the past participle finished placed at the head of a sentence without a verb most often agrees. Some authors leave it unchanged, perhaps because they see here the reduction of It’s finish “.
“We can explain this choice of chord by the possible double interpretation of this construction: No more worries! can be interpreted as Worries are over!while The worries are over! equals The worries are over. Whatever the deal, finished can be followed by a comma”, one can read in the article of the Bank of linguistic troubleshooting (BDL) of the Quebec Office of the French language devoted to the past participle finished used at the beginning of a sentence.
This elliptical turn is most often exclamatory or interrogative. For example, we would write The war is over! Where Is the war over? If we use the exclamation point, we must know that the exclamatory sentence, as indicated The right use, “adds an emotional connotation. It is not objective, neutral, because it includes the feelings of the speaker, manifested with particular force”.
You can also formulate your sentence differently and write instead The war is over! Where Will the war be over soon?
If you want to write a sentence without a verb with the past participle finishedrather than finishedit may be better to tune it and write The war is over!. “There are very few examples of the invariability of finished in this context, it is better to opt for variability, even if the invariability cannot be considered faulty”, underlines the BDL.