Craig,

 

What you've come close to saying, and what needs to be emphasized in
this discussion among teachers, is that this is a case where it doesn't
matter a lot which grammatical analysis we teach to UG grammar students
or how we deal with it in writing classes.  I agree that pedagogical
needs sometimes trump analytic validity.  No harm is done to students at
that level by calling it a pronoun or a conjunction.  I do the latter
because I know it to be true and I've developed materials to support
students as they learn the analysis.

 

I haven't ordered H&P's student book yet but I plan to.  And I look
forward to seeing yours.

 

Herb

 

 

Herb,
   I will check it out.  Over the weekend, I have reflected on how much
of my feeling for this may be influenced by writing and editing choices
and the notion that which and that sometimes replace each other
depending on restricitve or nonrestrictive nature of the clause.  The
notion that you can't use "that" for nonrestrictive is certainly
skewered by the fact that it is sometimes a subordinator in a content
clause and which is not an option. That kind of thinking (frame of
reference) tends to make me see that as pronoun in one case and
subordinator in the other. But I'm less and less entrenched. 
     We are in hearty agreement, I think, about the nuances of  that in
these different kinds of structures.  Classification into different
categories is certainly something understandable.  If I stick to
pronoun, it might be for ease in teaching and ease in copy editing.
   I just got H & P's Students Introduction to English Grammar  (from
Cambridge.).  Depsite the fact that my own book (soon to hit the real
world !) will compete, I'm looking forward to looking it over. We can't
have enough good grammar books, and a rising tide will float us all.
     Thanks, as always, for your patience with my questions.

Craig
Stahlke, Herbert F.W. wrote:



Craig,
 
Here are the rules governing the occurrence of "that" in content
clauses, quoting most of the time from Huddleston&Pullum (652-654):
 
"That" must appear if
a} when the content clause is subject or otherwise precedes the matrix
predicator
b) the content clause is adjunct, as in
 
He appealed to us to bring his case to the attention of the authorities
that justice might be done.
 
c) when the content clause is complelemtn to comparative "that"/"as", as
in
 
I'd rather (that) he hired a taxi than that he drove my car.
 
"That" must be omitted when the content clause is embedded within an
unbounded dependency in such a way that its subject is reallized by a
gap:
 
optional in She thinks (that) Max is the ringleader.
excluded in Who does she thing ___ is the ringleader?
 
In other cases there are a variety of conditions governing deletability
that I won't enumerate here.
 
H&P also lay out the conditions for the deletion of "that" in relative
clauses (pp. 1054-6).
 
"That" can't be deleted if the relativized element is the subject of the
relative clause, as in "The car that 0 hit us was Ed's".
 
"That" can't be deleted if it is not adjacent to the subject, as in "I
found I needed a file that only the day before I had sent to be
shredded."
 
"That" can't be deleted in supplementary (their term for
non-restrictive) relatives.
 
"That" can't be deleted if the RC is extraposed, as in "Something came
up that I hadn't predicted."
 
You're right that the conditions governing deletion in the two
structures, content vs. relative clauses.  However, I think this is a
function of the grammar of the two types of clause, not a result of
there being two different thats.
 
By the way, H&P also give an interesting set of reasons, beyond and
better than those I've given, for why "that" is not a pronoun in
relative clauses but is rather a subordinator.  But the arguments are
pretty detailed and you're better off going to H&P pp. 1056-7 yourself
for them.
 
Herb
 
Herb,
 
 
OK.  You pretty much got me now on subject deletion.  But it does still
seem to me that the deletion rules for content clauses are different
than for relatives, and that acts much like which and who when these
deletion decisions come into play.  I guess I'm holding out for the
point that it's more than the influence of traditional grammar that
keeps some of us thinking that acts enough like which and who to be more
than just a routine complementizer in certain instances.  The question
isn't so much whether I can follow and accept the argument as it is that
I still find this way of looking at it counterintuitive.  As Richard
said in an earlier post, if it feels like a pronoun, wouldn't it be a
pronoun?  If we can substitute it for which in some instances, does that
mean it is evolving pronoun like attributes?  Like many grammatical
phenomena, it is slightly different from everything else in its class?
    Is the fact that it sometimes feels like a pronoun irrelevant?
 
Craig
 
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