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  • Fascinating sentence: The insurer tries to recover what it can from whoever's fault it was. While probably ungrammatical, it's close to something that is grammatical and it's worth investigating why.

    Let's take a fully grammatical counterpart: ... from whoever is at fault. (The fact that this is can be contracted to give whoever's might have influenced the original sentence too.) In this, whoever is a fused relative. It is simultaneously head of the noun phrase whoever is at fault, which is complement of the preposition from, and subject of the verb phrase is at fault.

    In from whoever's fault it was, the whoever again heads the NP that's the complement of from, namely whoever's fault it was. But instead of being subject of a verb phrase, it's determiner of the nominal fault it was. (This nominal consists of a head noun and a relative clause modifying it.)

    We need to hand-wave over whether it's whoever or genitive whoever's that's head and/or determiner—the structural status of 's is unresolved amongst linguists anyway. This aside, we have a parallel: both subject and determiner are specifiers of their respective phrases.

    In both cases also the fused head can be unpacked into a complement NP with a modifying relative clause headed by a separate relative pronoun: from him whose fault it was; from him who is at fault. Thus it seems to me quite natural to produce the original sentence, and though I have to mark it as ungrammatical for my own speech, it quite possibly wasn't for the original speaker.

    June 19, 2009