Michael,

Without knowing more of the nature of your objection the examples, let me suggest that grammatical well-formedness is scalar rather than binary.  I regard both of these examples as acceptable in informal writing and speech but not in formal.  It's important to recognize that informal writing is not simply less disciplined English; it's English with slightly different rules.

But consider also the purpose for which I provided these examples.  The first was to illustrate a point about how coreference is expressed.  I noted with the example that English doesn't particularly like resumptive pronouns but that they aren't completely rejected.  The second was to demonstrate that that-deletion is possible even if a subject is absent.  The point of this was to support my contention that relative that is not a pronoun and that in a sentence like "Let me recommend a route that may be quicker" the subject of the relative clause has been deleted.  Of course, H&P's example of subject deletion was in a more formal register:  Who does she think ___ is the ringleader? where both "that" and the subject are absent.

Fortunately my argument doesn't depend crucially on these more peripheral examples.

Herb
 
I am wondering how much of Herb's argument depends on these two examples
that he cites.  Are these well-formed sentences of English?  Not in my
books.  I might have heard something of the first kind uttered (certainly
never written) by someone who got a little "tangled up" in what he wanted
to say (performance error).  And the second one sounds like something a
learner of English as a second language might utter.

Here's a book that I know the guy who wrote it.

This is the guy met me at the airport.

I am surprised that no one else on the list has yet objected to what
appears to me to be spurious evidence.  I appreciate the reference to
Huddleston and Pullum and look forward to investigating their framework
for understanding "that."


R. Michael Medley
Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, VA 22802
[log in to unmask]  (540) 432-4051

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