Question by India-based Prashant Solonki posted on the Forum's Facebook Gateway (September 10, 2017):Hello, Jose sir! I have a doubt on the usage of "all" and "whose." I'm confused about he following sentences:
1. "He is a person whose all efforts succeed."
2. "He is a person all whose efforts succeed."
Sir, actually I have a book by a local Indian author which is saying the 1st one is "incorrect" and suggesting using the second one.
Please explain why.
My reply to Prashant:Sentence 1, "He is a person
whose all efforts succeed," clearly has faulty syntax and a garbled construction; it is therefore incorrect in every respect. Sentence 2, "He is a person
all whose efforts succeed," is a pithy sentence construction that can pass as correct idiomatically. It can be grammatically tweaked to be correct in every respect by the simple insertion of the preposition "of" after "all," such that it reads as follows: "He is a person all
of whose efforts succeed." The tweak makes the adjective phrase "all of whose efforts succeed" formally modify "person" as the noun complement of the sentence. The absence of that "of" in Sentence 2 makes that construction an elliptical sentence that nevertheless reads and sounds correctly. Refer to my discussion of elliptical sentences in the Forum,
"Elliptical sentences often read and sound better than regular sentences."
