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English Language
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Analyze the advanced syntactic structures, relative pronoun governance, and prepositional placement in the following complex sentence:"The committee members whom were appointed by the board to review the financial discrepancies objected to the new auditing guidelines proposed for the upcoming fiscal year."Identify whether any of the underlined segments contains a grammatical error according to standard English syntax.
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Detailed Explanation
In the given sentence, the underlined segment "whom" is grammatically incorrect. The relative pronoun introduces the restrictive relative clause "whom were appointed by the board". Within this clause, the pronoun functions as the subject of the verb "were appointed", not as an object. Therefore, the subjective case "who" must be used instead of the objective case "whom". For a detailed discussion on the distinction between subject and object pronouns, refer to the Wikipedia Reference on English relative clauses.
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