Whoever versus whomever

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He was walking up the stairs and shooting whoever he saw.

The above is a sentence within a news item published by a popular national English daily.

"Whoever" is a pronoun in the subjective case. If we substiture such pronoun with a noun, say 'people'. The sentence will then be 'He was walking up the stairs and shooting people he saw'. By changing 'people' into a pronoun, we should have 'He was walking up the stairs and shooting they or them he saw'.

It is not difficult to realize that after the verb 'was shooting', we need a pronoun in the objective case. Hence, the sentence in question should have been "He was walking up the stairs and shooting whomever he saw ".

We should, however, not be confused with the sentence "Ask whoever is there". Here, 'whoever' cannot be singled out as it is used together with 'is there' to become a noun clause to be the object of the verb 'ask'. The subject of this sentence is 'you' which has been omitted as being understood.

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