Herb,

Still, intuitively, it's hard to see how in the following pair, we are
using "who" and "that" differently.

        The boss who hired me ...
        The boss that hired me ...

They sure feel like they're interchangeable and performing the same
function. Might it be that they evolved on different historical paths
but that in the mental grammar of the typical present-day speaker of
English have come to be identical in function? If so, wouldn't that
function be that of relative pronoun?

Dick Veit
________________________
 
Richard Veit
Department of English, UNCW
Wilmington, NC 28403-5947
910-962-3324
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Stahlke, Herbert F.W.
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2005 9:40 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Question re "That" vs. "Who"

Helene,

To expand on my cryptic response to Martha, "that" is the older of the
two ways of starting a relative clause.  "Who" doesn't appear in
relative clauses until the 15th century.  "That" appears six centuries
earlier.  At the time, "that", or its ancestor, was not a pronoun.  It
also is not a pronoun in modern English. It is simply a subordinating
conjunction.  This addresses directly the question of whether or not
"that" can refer to humans.  It's a conjunction.  Conjunctions don't
refer to anything.  Using "that" in something like "The man that met me
at the airport" is fine because "that" is a subordinating conjunction
and doesn't replace the subject or stand for the subject or refer to
"the man" because only pronouns refer and it's not a pronoun.

The rule that "that" can't refer to humans is a stylistic preference
based on a faulty grammatical analysis.  I don't claim to be the first
to argue that relative "that" isn't a pronoun.  Otto Jespersen, probably
the greatest grammarian ever in the history of English, argued for it in
great detail in the first half of the 20th century.

I haven't presented the evidence for the conjunction analysis, because
I've done that before on this list, but I'll be glad to if you'd like to
see it.

Herb Stahlke
Another Ball Stater

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