who. that.

Q: Consider this sentence from the New York Times — specifically, the text that comes after the colon (I added the emphasis):

“The fact that the bill could slightly add to the federal deficit did not dissuade House Democrats from voting for it, in part because the analysis boiled down to a dispute over a single line item: How much the I.R.S. would collect by cracking down on people and companies that dodge large tax bills.”

Now, if I use the word “people” (or refer to a person), then grammar demands that the word “who” follow. By contrast, inanimate objects (basically, everything else, including companies) get “that” or “which.”

But what happens, as in the above example, when a sentence contains both “people” and “companies”? Does “people” always predominate? Or is the last pronoun (in this case, “companies”) the deciding factor?

A: In many “either/or” constructions, the inflected word that must apply to each element is governed by the element listed last. Thus:

“companies and people who...”

or

“people and companies that...”

This is true, for example, when the associated verb must be governed by the subject’s grammatical person (“If either he or I am chosen, the other will concede”) or grammatical number (“If either they or he shows up, I’m leaving”).

Admittedly, a construction like these can strike the ear as awkward, and a careful writer might avoid it by adding a “modal auxiliary,” or “helping verb,” like this:

“If either they or he should show up, I’m leaving.”