Can 'in which to' and 'with which to' be replaced by just 'to' in the following sentences?
- All of these factors make them an ideal population in which to test these competing hypotheses about how language is learned.
in which to?
- These children began learning English at an older age than Us natives and had more mature brains with which to tackle the test.
with which to?
Can't we just omit "in which" and "with which"?
All of these factors make them an ideal population to test these competing hypotheses about how language is learned.
These children began learning English at an older age than Us natives and had more mature brains to tackle the test.
Can somebody please explain the grammar here?
Just to be sure, can we we bring "to + simple verb" after "in which" and "at which"?
The first sentence should keep the "in which," because the population is being tested. Otherwise, it sounds like the population could be the testers who would be doing the testing on another group.
The second sentence is fine as is. Aharon suggests that the sentence should be clear about the source of the learning, the children or their brains. However, no matter what or how you learn, your brain does the learning. Attributing learning to the ear or tongue is like saying the microphone creates a recording instead of the actual voice recorder. People are smart. They understand this concept and deduce the meaning of a sentence in nanoseconds. Their brains would get the same meaning from either construction of the sentence. The brain favors plain language. Let's be plain here and kill this instance of "in which."
You can omit the "with which" or "in which but" the emphasis on the reason to register and what they conclude in those sentence will be lost in case of omitting them.
I see this as two omissions: the first is the grammatical "which," which is desired formally, and the second omission removes the preposition which is informational. The only way to remove the which without the preposition (not losing meaning) is informal. And the double omission remove more elegance which may be the aim of omission but not in this academic case.
- "... more mature brains to tackle the test with."
- "... an ideal population to test these competing hypotheses about how language is learned in."
The second shows how inappropriate the omission is in this type of text.
Looking for the rule, it is "to + simple verb ... preposition" to = "preposition + which to + simple verb ... ."