Craig,

I don't think anyone questions whether wh-words are pronouns.  That much is pretty clear.  The problem is with "that".  The morpho-syntactic evidence is overwhelming that relative "that" is not a pronoun and is a subordinating conjunction, that there is, in fact, no difference between the "thats" in 

I know that it's raining.

and

The rain that's falling now will flood the fields.

They're the same thing.  The claim that "that" in relative clauses is a pronoun is a claim grounded in a school grammar tradition that is seriously flawed in many ways, this being one of them.  When you say "that is a pronoun in some camps and a complementizer in others when it functions within a relative clause," you beg the question.  "That" in a relative clause has no function within the clause.  It simply introduces it.  It is not subject, object, OP, or anything else.  Those relationships are marked by the absence of a noun phrase in the appropriate position, not by "that".

Content clauses and relative clauses are similar in that they are both embedded sentences.  They differ in that content clauses are complements of verbs, nouns, or adjectives and that relative clauses are modifiers of nouns.  It is the modifier relationship that leads to the structural gaps exhibited by relative clauses but not by content clauses.

I don't think the problem of appositives has anything to do with the analysis of "that".  Rather, it has to do with the ill-defined nature of the term appositive.  Here are some examples.

1. My brother Bill ...
2. Bill's statement that he was in Chicago at the time ...
3. Bill, who lives in Chicago, ...
4. Chicago, hog butcher to the world, ...
5. Bill's party, scheduled for last night, ...
6. The idea that Bill lives in Chicago ...
etc.

At best, appositive is a function, not a structure, and I'm not entirely sure that it's a function.  I think rather that it's a traditional term used to describe a disparate variety of structures all of which occur after nouns.  It has some usefulness if used with care.  Calling 1,3,4,5 appositives doesn't bother me much, but including 2 and 6 does.  I think they're different structures, complements to their head nouns rather than modifiers, and calling them appositives just confuses matters.

But this is where poorly defined traditional grammar terms get us.

Herb
Herb,
    I know we have gone back and forth on this one before, and I'm still not convinced, but I think it may be important to clarify that there seems to be agreement that there is such a thing as a relative pronoun (who, with its various forms, and which, when functioning within these adjectival clauses), but that is a pronoun in some camps and a complementizer in others when it functions within a relative clause. We tend to agree that it is a complementizer in noun clauses precisely because it clearly has no role within the noun clause.
    I'm wondering whether you see any difference between a content clause structure and relative clause structure. (Are these the same structures, but differing in context by function?) The argument for these as appositional seems to hinge, at least for me, on the sense that that functions differently. Is the notion of appositional noun clause somewhat dependent on the misunderstanding of the role of that as pronoun, at least as you see it? Should we discard the category?

Craig

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