Herb,
My impression is that the construction you are looking at is the result of certain elisions that the interpreter may have difficulty restoring. This is not to say that the construction is not reanalyzed as a co-ordination, just that perhaps it was not originally intended to be. Consider the possibility that the original was meant as "We may have to postpone some promises, which (if we do) we're going to get through this."
Perhaps your other example has elisions of the definite reference: "We were going to go on a picnic (last) Saturday, (on) which (Saturday) it rained." I was reminded when seeing these sentences of the surprisingly common omission of elements of an adverb clause contained within a restrictive adjective clause: "She sent a letter which unless we get back, must ruin them both." - (Jespersen. A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles, Vol. IV. 1931. P. 202) The complete omission of the adverbial element, tempting when it is so close to its antecedent, runs the risk of losing the connection of the adjective clause to that antecedent: and behold, a new interpretation and a correspondingly new syntactic analysis -- grammaticalization in action.
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of STAHLKE, HERBERT F
Sent: Wednesday, June 03, 2009 10:46 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: which we're going to get through this
I posted the following on the American Dialect Society List ADS-L, and I'm cross-posting to ATEG in hopes that some of you may have run into this curious construction and may be able to shed some light on it.
There are a couple of TV ads on currently featuring a working-class
guy telling his family, in one, and his son in the other, that he may
get laid off. In the family ad he saiys something like "We may have
to postpone some promises, which we're going to get through this."
Those are not the exact words, but the use of "which" is as he uses it
in the ad. I suspect the usage may be employed by the writers as a
marker of class, and I've heard it before in sentences like "We were
going to go on a picnic Saturday, which it rained." I don't remember
hearing it used much by college educated speakers. The social
contexts have been working class.
Wh-indefinite pronouns or question words started to show up as
relative pronouns in the 10th c. under the influence of Latin, but
with the demise of English as a written standard after the Norman
Conquest, the shift disappeared until English once again became a more
widely used written language in the late 13th c. The wh-relatives
came into literate, educated English between about 1300 and 1600, with
a few changes in usage after that. The King James Version (1611)
translates the first phrase of the Lord's Prayer as "Our father which
art in heaven," but since about the 18th c. "which" has not been used
to refer to humans.
The usage of wh-relatives does seem to be related to level of
education, and I wonder if the use of "which" as a sort of
coordinating conjunction, as above, might be a hypercorrection.
Speakers who don't have the professional class rules governing "which"
know that some people use "which" in ways in which they themselves
don't. The "which" plus coordinate clause construction arises as an
unsuccessful attempt to emulate those rules. Treating these sentences
in this way is a WAG. I've searched the ADS-L archives for postings
dealing with "which," and I found the usual "that" vs. "which"
discussions, quite a few of them in fact, but none dealing with the
coordinating usage. Does anyone know of scholarship that deals with
this construction?
Herb
Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
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