Thursday 18 June 2015

pronouns - 'Which', 'whose' or something else?

Whose is the way to go here. Merriam-Webster defines it as follows:




of or relating to whom or which especially as possessor or possessors




Which wouldn't work, because it doesn't indicate possession. It would work, however, if the phrase read:




I am looking for elements which are relatively large (in size).




As to the "size is" vs "sizes are", I would say that both are grammatically correct, though the singular is preferred. The Google stats look as follows:



  • "are * whose sizes are" — 94,700

  • "are * whose size is" — 1,020,000

Searching the British National Corpus returns four results for "whose size is" (one of which is actually used with a plural noun, "segments whose size is"), but none for "whose sizes are".

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