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> as an American a sentence like "Whom did you invite to the party?" sounds a bit stilted and formal to me

It would be fair to call this ungrammatical in American English.

But whom does survive in fronted prepositional phrases ("the person for whom this item was obtained..."). It's dead in prepositional phrases that haven't been fronted just like it's dead everywhere else.

Something vaguely similar happened in Spanish, where there is a special pronoun case that can only be used with the preposition con ("with"). There, the special case descends from, interestingly enough, the same preposition, Latin cum, instead of from the Latin case system. But the phenomenon ends up being the same.




"Whom in this room would you boom?" is not ungrammatical though.

https://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/11/theater/sunday-view-party...


It's certainly a surprising enough construct that it sounds incorrect, which is the metric that matters most to most people.


> "Whom in this room would you boom?" is not ungrammatical though.

Try polling some people on that.




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