I've run into it occasionally too, and Larry Horn is right that the complementizer "that" has to be reanalyzed as a relative pronoun for it to take a genitive suffix. This is the only sure piece of evidence I know of showing relative "that" as a pronoun.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Robert Yates
Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2011 11:35 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: "thats" for "whose"
Herb,
Over the weekend, I was reading a set of papers and had a relative that's.
Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri
>>> "STAHLKE, HERBERT F" <[log in to unmask]> 02/15/11 9:57 PM >>>
We've had considerable discussion of relative "that" from time to time, and I thought the following exchange from ADS-L might be of interest.
Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
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I mentioned this some years ago. I had a freshman in the early '80s who insisted that "that's" was correct because "whose" referred to people.
When I surveyed English Department graduate students with a fill-in-the-blank quiz, a fair number filled in the blanks with "that's"
instead of "whose."
God knows what they wrote in their own papers. They were mainly working on masters' rather than doctoral degrees, if that makes anyone feel better. And did I mention that the degrees would be in English? Yeah, I guess I did.
JL
>
> On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 4:30 PM, Laurence Horn
> <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
> wrote:
>
> > it's an instance of "that" (reanalyzed from complementizer to
> > relative pronoun) in the genitive, as noted.
> >
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