I came across another bit from Jespersen that offers some historical
insight into the presence and absence of "that". He's speaking of
content clauses, but the same applies pretty much to relative clauses:
In combinations like "I think he is dead" it is historically wrong to
say that the conjunction that is omitted. Both "I think he is dead" and
"I think that he is dead" are evolved out of original parataxis of two
independent sentences: "I think: he is dead" and "I think that: he is
dead". In the second the word that, which was originally the
demonstrative pronoun, was accentually weakened, as shown also in the
vowel, which is now usually [@] (schwa) and not [ae] as in the
demonstrative pronoun, and this weakened that came to be felt to belong
to the clause instead of, as originally , to what preceded, i. e. it
became a "conjunction".
He goes on with some further very interesting discussion, but I'll leave
that to others to look up if it interests them.
Herb
Bill,
The examples you give are all what I have called the declarative noun
clause. The key to understanding the distribution is to realize that
such a clause may appear in the same uses as a noun phrase. Just as
there are occasions when the noun phrase is used adverbially, so the
DecNC may appear in such structures. The connective for the DecNC is
"that."
(A) i. The proposal did not address budgetary concerns.
(A) m. It was problematic in this regard.
The matrix uses a prepostional phrase adverbially.
(B) i. The proposal did not address budgetary concerns. (= A i )
(B) m. It was acceptable except for this fact.
Here the adverb "except" is complemented by a prepositional phrase. As
is quite common, the DecNC dissolves the preposition of a complement.
Compare,
John was sorry that it did not address budgetary concerns.
m. John was sorry about this fact.
Notice also that the noun "fact" is often appropriate to express the way
the content of the clause is to be regarded. The last example is
reduced from a compound sentence. The matrix would be:
(C) m. There was no question about it.
The compound sentence using the adversative requires a contrast; the
negative in the first sentence would be one of these:
(C) i1. The proposal may have addressed budgetary concerns.
(conceivably)
(C) i2. The proposal did not address budgetary concerns. (= A i)
(C) i. The proposal may have addressed budgetary concerns, but it did
not.
(C) i'. It may have, but the proposal did not address budgetary
concerns.
The matrix then takes the DecNC with the first part of the imbed
understood. I think that each of these phenomena need to be explained
independently, before the full construction can be explained fully.
Maybe this way of looking at the structure will help.
Bruce.
>>> [log in to unmask] 3/15/2005 4:10:35 PM >>>
Herb,
I think that an argument can be made for a distinction between A-B on
the one hand, and C on the other (they aren't completely parallel, so
the distinction may be vacuous, but it's a start):
(A) The proposal was problematic in that it did not address budgetary
concerns.
(B) The proposal was acceptable except that it did not address budgetary
concerns.
(C) There was no question but that the proposal did not address
budgetary concerns.
Removing the "X that" constituent yields the following:
(A') The proposal was problematic.
(B') The proposal was acceptable.
(C') There was no question.
The "but that" expression in C seems to be pinning down the meaning of
"question" in a way that's much more crucial to the interpretation of
the sentence than the expressions in A and B pin down the meaning of
what they modify - i.e., I can see the "but that" expression as acting
much more like a restrictive relative ("Which question?). Of course, A
and B have adjectives, rather than nouns, which may be causing the
difference. The only examples of "in that" I could devise in which it
modified a noun involved assignment to categories:
The platypus is a typical mammal in that it provides milk to
its young, but is an atypical mammal in that it lays eggs.
I don't think the "in that" construction is modifying "mammal" in this
case the same way "but that" modifies "question" in the earlier one. In
this type of example an adjectival constituent ("[is] typically
mammalian") can be substituted for the nominal version without much
change in meaning; the same kind of substitution (question -->
questionable) won't work with C.
Again, I'm honestly not sure what this means, if anything at all - it's
an interesting construction, and I'm just gnawing on it (if I live to be
ninety, I think I'll still be encountering constructions I never really
thought about closely before). As you pointed out, it's "fossilized" to
large extent, and could be expected to be anomalous. I'm just wondering
if this is the kind of case that led Curme to class "but that" as a
relativizer.
Bill Spruiell
________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Stahlke, Herbert F.W.
Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2005 2:18 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: which and that
Bill,
How about "in that S" or "except that S"? Those are the only other ones
I can think of at the moment. The distribution of "that" has interested
me for some time, and there used to be a lot more possibilities, "after
that S", "because that S". I think the head word had more of a
prepositional or adverbial function and the "that" was necessary to mark
the subordination, but as we get into Modern and Late Modern English,
the subordinating function gets subsumed by the head and the "that"
disappears. "In that", "but that", and "except that" are relics left
over by this change.
Herb
________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Spruiell, William C
Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2005 1:28 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: which and that
Herb -
That sounds perfectly reasonable to me (for one thing, I can think of
plenty of examples with regular nouns after the but). I was just casting
about for something that could potentially be analyzed as a relative
(and again, I hadn't really thought about that kind of construction
before). Playing devil's advocate, though - what other prepositional
phrases allow a 'that'-clause as an object? All the ones I can think of
off the top of my head require an additional "which," yielding a
different structure (about that which X, for that which X, etc.). Could
this type of construction be limited enough that Curme thought it better
to deal with it as a relative than as a PP?
The only other examples I've found so far in FROWN involved clear cases
of but coordinating two that-clauses, but I haven't checked any
nineteenth-century material yet.
Bill Spruiell
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Stahlke, Herbert F.W.
Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2005 1:17 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: which and that
I think this comes about in a different way. As English was developing
a whole array of subordinators, it used most of them with "that". In
Middle English and Early Modern English combinations like "which that"
"because that", etc. were common. We keep just a few of them in Modern
English, like "except that", "now that", and a few others. But in all
other cases the "that" has disappeared. I'd argue here that "but" in
your sentence is a preposition with a that-clause as its object.
Herb
________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Spruiell, William C
Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2005 1:10 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: which and that
I've been trying to find relative examples of "but that" in some of the
corpora I have. I haven't run across a firm example yet, but I did run
across the following, which I hadn't really thought about before, and am
now wondering how to analyze (FROWN J31 134-5):
There can be no question [[but that]] this resistance emanates from his
ego ....
This doesn't seem like a relative clause to me, but it's.....relativish.
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University
________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Veit, Richard
Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2005 9:20 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: which and that
Here's an example from Dickens of "as" as a relative pronoun. Sam Weller
says, "...the turnkeys takes wery good care to seize hold o' ev'ry body
but them as pays 'em..."
I'd like to see some "but" and "but that" examples.
________________________
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: Tuesday, March 15, 2005 8:51 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: which and that
Here's another take on relative pronouns. I happened to be checking
Curme's Parts of Speech and Accidence this morning, on another matter
entirely, when I came across the following in a section headed "Relative
Pronouns with Antecedent":
"These relative pronouns are who, which, that, as, but, but that, but
what (colloquial), the indefinites whoever, whatever, and whichever, and
other less common forms enumerated in [his Syntax, the other part of
Curme and Kurath's A Grammar of the English Language (HFWS]."
I suspect we could get into an interesting discussion of "as", "but",
and "but that".
Herb
TEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
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