Craig,
The pattern you illustrate below is certainly true of Standard English. However, in colloquial speech and in non-ztandard varieties of English "that" is dropped regularly before 0 subjects in relatives. I hear people say things like "Anyone/thing touches you touches me" fairly regularly. This syntactic change is taking place because that's outside the relative clause, just as it's outside the content clause. If it were a pronoun and perceived as a pronoun cognitively, then I would also expect to hear things like "Thatever gambles loses" along with "Whoever gambles loses." But that's one I don't hear. The fact that "that" doesn't delete before a 0 subject relative clause in Formal Standard English reflects the conservatism of that dialect.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
Sent: Monday, December 20, 2010 5:54 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Noun clauses
Herb,
It has always been my understanding that finite subordinate clauses require an explicit subject. That may be one reason why the relative can't be dropped if it's in subject role.
Example: "Anyone who touches you touches me."
"Anyone [whom] you touch touches me."
Deletion is possible in the second example, but not the first.
Example: "Anything that touches you touches me."
"Anything [that]you touch touches me."
Deletion is possible in the second, but not the first.
There is nothing parallel to that with content clauses since the "that" remains fully outside the clause and is never used to stand in (or place hold)for a missing subject. Relative clauses and content clauses have formal (not just functional) differences.
Craig
> Craig,
>
> My problem with saying that it sometimes has a place holding function
> is that it's an impressionistic statement. If we ask what it's doing
> in a particular clause we can't provide any sort of evidence for a
> solution different form subordinator. A statement like yours follows
> from certain assumptions, but the assumptions themselves, for example,
> that "that" is a relative pronoun, are difficult to support.
> Historical change gives us some help but must be interpreted very
> cautiously, which is why I'm not willing to say that pronominal status
> has not developed beyond the non-standard genitive use.
>
> Besides a general feeling about it, how can you argue that relative
> "that" is performing a function in the relative clause, an argument
> that can't be handled as well or better by deletion under identity?
>
> Herb
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
> Sent: Monday, December 20, 2010 10:22 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Noun clauses
>
> Herb,
> I might be content with saying that relative "that" acts in ways
> that are very unique and that make it hard to classify. The important
> work is in describing how it acts. In content clauses, it is always
> outside the clause, but in relative clauses, it sometimes has a place
> holding function. The category we place it in depends on how we draw
> the lines for the category.
>
> Craig
>
> On 12/18/2010 10:13 PM, STAHLKE, HERBERT F wrote:
>> Craig,
>>
>> A question was raised off-list about whether "that" is taking on some
>> pronoun function in the genitive in non-standard varieties. This
>> appears to be the case. I like your examples showing that rel-that
>> and conj-that behave alike, but I think the spelling identity of the
>> subordinator and the demonstrative leads speakers to identify them
>> with each other, even if their history and their syntax and morphology argue
>> otherwise. In a non-standard construction like "Did you see a book
>> that's cover was torn?" "that's" is clearly pronominal. I think
>> "that's" arises by analogy to the genitive pronouns
>> yours/his/hers/its/ours/theirs even though those can't be used as
>> determiners. (And, by the way, I think the spelling should be "thats,"
>> without the apostrophe, like the other genitive pronouns. Microsoft
>> Word keeps putting in the apostrophe for some reason.) Analogical
>> change is by its very nature irregular, and so that fact that
>> genitive "thats" is developing in non-standard usage tells us nothing
>> about what's happening categorially to "that" in other relative constructions.
>> Remember Sturtevant's Paradox: Sound change is regular and
>> produces irregularity; analogical change is irregular and produces regularity.
>>
>> On morphosyntactic grounds, I maintain the arguments that relative
>> "that" is not a pronoun. We can gain insight into how the grammar of
>> "that" is changing only by extrapolating from examples of usage. We
>> can't do much with people's naïve feeling and hunches about grammar,
>> and I know you're not suggesting that.
>>
>> Herb
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
>> Sent: Saturday, December 18, 2010 10:38 AM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: Noun clauses
>>
>> Herb,
>> You and I have been over this one before and I don't want to
>> just repeat that. But I do have a question. When "that" is required
>> in the subject slot of a relative clause (As in "Anything that
>> touches you touches me") is "that" simply holding down a slot (for
>> sentence processing ease)or is it actually acting as subject in that
>> relative clause?
>> My current sense of this is that it's more a matter of drawing
>> classification lines than it is of disputing how this stuff works.
>> The dynamics of a relative clause are different from the dynamics of
>> a content clause BECAUSE DELETION OF A SENTENCE ELEMENT DOESN'T OCCUR
>> IN CONTENT CLAUSES. In a content clause, "that" remains fully outside
>> the clause (in a way that the "wh" pronouns do not.) For that reason,
>> we can say "His wish that she would be at peace was granted" includes
>> a clause ("that she would be at peace") that is more like a content
>> clause than a relative. We can also use "that"
>> along with "wh" pronouns in a content clause. "I believe that what
>> she said was right." In a relative clause, we have much more the
>> feeling that we are choosing between them, as we do with "that" and
>> "which". Some books recommend "that" for restrictive, "which" for
>> non-restrictive. You have nothing parallel to that choice in content
>> clauses.
>> So "that" has some overlap with the "wh" pronouns in relative
>> clauses that it doesn't have in content clauses.
>> I have seen a sudden increase in an awkward "in which" pattern, I
>> think coming out of New York City. "We were driving a car in which I
>> bought from my brother." That's not an actual example, so I may be
>> distorting the context, but in the cases I've seen, an unusual
>> number, the "in"
>> seems not at all appropriate. It does seem to come more from a spoken
>> dialect.
>>
>> Craig
>> Seth,
>>> That's one of the arguments I didn't go into. There is a hierarchy
>>> of grammatical relations that governs all sorts of movement and
>>> deletion processes across languages, called the Keenan-Comrie
>>> Accessibility Hierarchy. Here's an example from the Wikipedia
>>> article on the KCAH, which is worth reading:
>>>
>>> Subject That's the man [who ran away]. The girl [who came late]
>>> is my
>>> sister.
>>> Direct object That's the man [I saw yesterday]. The girl
>>> [Kate saw] is
>>> my sister.
>>> Indirect object That's the man [to whom I gave the letter].
>>> The girl
>>> [whom I wrote a letter to] is my sister.
>>> Oblique That's the man [I was talking about]. The girl [whom I
>>> sat next
>>> to] is my sister.
>>> Genitive That's the man [whose sister I know]. The girl [whose
>>> father
>>> died] told me she was sad.
>>> Obj of Comp That's the man [I am taller than]. The girl [who Kate
>>> is
>>> smarter than] is my sister.
>>>
>>> Notice that "that" can occur in prepositional phrases only if the
>>> preposition is stranded. "...to that I was talking" is not possible.
>>> Also, the genitive, as I pointed out earlier, does not allow "that."
>>> These are precisely the positions in which asyndetic relatives are
>>> also ungrammatical. There is an extension of this in colloquial
>>> speech and in non-standard dialects where the gap in the relative
>>> clause is filled by a resumptive pronoun. These occur in genitive
>>> and comparatives especially, although they'll also occur in more
>>> complex constructions. An example would be "?I'd like you to meet
>>> the poet that we read a lot of her work last year." We certainly
>>> would not allow that in formal writing, but it's not at all unusual
>>> in speech.
>>>
>>> The comparative marker "than" acts a lot like a preposition in
>>> English, and so if we combine it with prepositional phrases, which
>>> in this version are collapsed with indirect objects, then what we
>>> see is that asyndetic relatives are blocked only at the lowest level
>>> of the hierarchy, Genitives. The fact that "that" can't be dropped
>>> if the gap is in subject position is a separate phenomenon that is
>>> related to language processing needs. Otherwise that-deletion in
>>> noun clauses and in relatives is pretty much the same rule.
>>> That-relatives and zero-relatives then fall together into one
>>> subclass of relative clauses that behave differently from wh-relatives.
>>>
>>> This distinction between that- and wh-relatives reflects the history
>>> of the language. Historically, English had only the that-type and
>>> asyndetic relatives, although the subordinator was "tha" rather than
>>> "that."
>>> This
>>> is a reflection of the strongly paratactic structure of Old English:
>>> not a lot of subordination but lots of main clauses in sequence,
>>> sometimes conjoined by "and." Old English did not have wh-relatives
>>> until the Late Old English period when they developed probably from
>>> indefinite relatives under the influence of Latin, which the scribes
>>> of the time knew well. In Latin, relative clauses had to be formed
>>> with relative pronouns fully inflected for gender, number, and case.
>>> After the Norman Conquest, when the tradition of Alfred the Great's
>>> English scriptoria was suppressed, wh-relatives also disappeared and
>>> didn't reappear until the late 13th c.
>>> when, once again, Latin influenced writers borrowed the structure
>>> from Latin. Wh-relatives even today are more strongly a feature of
>>> educated standard English than of non-standard dialects, which use
>>> that- and zero- relatives much more. In fact, wh-relatives are
>>> still so much a function of formal education and of Standard English
>>> that when non-standard speakers attempt to use the wh-pronouns to
>>> initiate clauses they frequently use them in unusual ways, as in
>>> sentences like "We were going to have a picnic Saturday, which it rained."
>>> Such wh-coordination is not at all uncommon in spoken non-standard
>>> dialects.
>>>
>>> Herb
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
>>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Katz, Seth
>>> Sent: Friday, December 17, 2010 3:04 PM
>>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>> Subject: Re: Noun clauses
>>>
>>> Hey, Herb--
>>>
>>> Thanks for recapitulating the argument for that being just a
>>> subordinator and not a pronoun. You always make me think. A lot. A
>>> nice break from grading.
>>>
>>> Unless I am misunderstanding you, I would note an exception to a
>>> claim you make. You say
>>>
>>>
>>> * It is deletable, like the subordinator "that" and unlike
>>> pronouns.
>>>
>>>
>>> But the wh-pronouns are deletable in adjective clauses, when the
>>> pronoun fills the direct object role in the dependent clause, as in
>>>
>>> The woman whom you met this morning is an old friend of mine.
>>> The woman _____ you met this morning is an old friend of mine.
>>>
>>> Am I missing something in what you said?
>>>
>>> Happy end-of-semester--
>>> Seth
>>>
>>> Dr. Seth Katz
>>> Assistant Professor
>>> Department of English
>>> Bradley University
>>>
>>> Faculty Advisor
>>> Bradley University Hillel
>>>
>>> ________________________________
>>>
>>> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of
>>> Stahlke, Herbert F.W.
>>> Sent: Fri 12/17/2010 12:45 PM
>>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>> Subject: Re: Noun clauses
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> John,
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> We've had some extensive discussion in past years on the status of
>>> "that"
>>> in clauses like these. There has not been complete agreement on all
>>> of it, but here's the position I've taken, which is also the
>>> position of Otto Jespersen in his A Modern English Grammar on
>>> Historical Principles and Huddleston& Pullum in their rather more
>>> recent Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> There are two function words "that" in English. One is the distal
>>> demonstrative "that" with its plural "these," and the other is the
>>> subordinator "that" as found in the clauses you have provided. When
>>> "that" is used to introduce a relative clause, it is simply a
>>> subordinator, not a relative pronoun. The relative pronouns are the
>>> wh- words. This analysis implies that there is a gap in the
>>> relative clause corresponding to the head noun, so in "The pitches
>>> that Casey missed..."
>>> the gap is in direct object position where "pitches" would be if the
>>> relative clause were a main clause instead. If it's the subject
>>> that is zero, most speakers require "that" to avoid processing
>>> problems that arise when a second finite verb occurs in a sentence
>>> without any overt marking that it is in a subordinate clause, so in
>>> "The ball that got past Casey was a strike" the dropping of "that"
>>> would leave "The ball got past Casey was a strike" which some
>>> speakers will use but writers will avoid.
>>> The
>>> fact that "that" is required there for clarity is not evidence that
>>> it's a relative pronoun but simply a restriction on bare or
>>> asyndetic relative clauses.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> There are several reasons for calling "that" a subordinator in all
>>> of its non-demonstrative uses.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> * It's always unstressed, as is the subordinator "that."
>>> Pronominal and determiner "that" are rarely unstressed.
>>>
>>> * If it were a pronoun in relative clauses, then we would
>>> expect
>>> it to have a plural "those" in "*The pitches those Casey missed...."
>>>
>>> * There is no possessive form, although there is for wh-
>>> relatives, so we can't say "*The ball that's casing came off...."
>>>
>>> * It is deletable, like the subordinator "that" and unlike
>>> pronouns.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> There are more argument, and I recommend the treatment in
>>> Huddleston& Pullum. There is also a very thorough critique of this
>>> analysis by Johan van der Auwera in Journal of Linguistics 21
>>> (1985), 149-179 titled "Relative that - a centennial dispute. It's
>>> a fascinating, thoughtful, and incisive critique.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Herb
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
>>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of John Chorazy
>>> Sent: Friday, December 17, 2010 12:21 PM
>>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>> Subject: Noun clauses
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Hello to all... I've been talking with students (11th grade) about
>>> clauses and have collected some questions that the list might have
>>> some thoughts on.
>>>
>>> The use of "that" as the head of a noun clause (and subject): "That
>>> the healthcare system needs fixing is obvious."
>>>
>>> "That" used in an adjective phrase: "Unlike the cat that slept all
>>> day, the dog ran around and barked."
>>>
>>> And if we can get some insight to the following use of "that": "Lynn
>>> Margulis' theory that evolution is a process rather than a
>>> competition differs dramatically from the theories of most biologists."
>>>
>>> Are the last two simply restrictive clauses using the relative pronoun?
>>>
>>> Also (a bit different) - anyone care to parse the following? "Should
>>> you have any trouble identifying the house, just remember that it
>>> has a big brass knocker on the door." Students see the implied "you"
>>> as the subject and its verb remember, but not what's going on up front.
>>>
>>> Thank you very much!
>>>
>>> Sincerely,
>>>
>>> John
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> John Chorazy
>>> English III Academy, Honors, and Academic Pequannock Township High
>>> School
>>>
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