Herb,
    You and I have been over this one before and I don't want to just
repeat that. But I do have a question. When "that" is required in the
subject slot of a relative clause (As in "Anything that touches you
touches me") is "that" simply holding down a slot (for sentence
processing ease)or is it actually acting as subject in that relative
clause?
   My current sense of this is that it's more a matter of drawing
classification lines than it is of disputing how this stuff works. The
dynamics of a relative clause are different from the dynamics of a
content clause BECAUSE DELETION OF A SENTENCE ELEMENT DOESN'T OCCUR IN
CONTENT CLAUSES. In a content clause, "that" remains fully outside the
clause (in a way that the "wh" pronouns do not.) For that reason, we
can say "His wish that she would be at peace was granted" includes a
clause ("that she would be at peace") that is more like a content
clause than a relative. We can also use "that" along with "wh" pronouns
in a content clause. "I believe that what she said was right." In a
relative clause, we have much more the feeling that we are choosing
between them, as we do with "that" and "which". Some books recommend
"that" for restrictive, "which" for non-restrictive. You have nothing
parallel to that choice in content clauses.
   So "that" has some overlap with the "wh" pronouns in relative clauses
that it doesn't have in content clauses.
   I have seen a sudden increase in an awkward "in which" pattern, I think
coming out of New York City. "We were driving a car in which I bought
from my brother." That's not an actual example, so I may be distorting
the context, but in the cases I've seen, an unusual number, the "in"
seems not at all appropriate. It does seem to come more from a spoken
dialect.

Craig
Seth,
>
> That's one of the arguments I didn't go into.  There is a hierarchy of
> grammatical relations that governs all sorts of movement and deletion
> processes across languages, called the Keenan-Comrie Accessibility
> Hierarchy.  Here's an example from the Wikipedia article on the KCAH,
> which is worth reading:
>
> Subject 	That's the man [who ran away]. 	The girl [who came late] is my
> sister.
> Direct object 	That's the man [I saw yesterday]. 	The girl [Kate saw] is
> my sister.
> Indirect object 	That's the man [to whom I gave the letter]. 	The girl
> [whom I wrote a letter to] is my sister.
> Oblique 	That's the man [I was talking about]. 	The girl [whom I sat next
> to] is my sister.
> Genitive 	That's the man [whose sister I know]. 	The girl [whose father
> died] told me she was sad.
> Obj of Comp 	That's the man [I am taller than]. 	The girl [who Kate is
> smarter than] is my sister.
>
> Notice that "that" can occur in prepositional phrases only if the
> preposition is stranded.  "...to that I was talking" is not possible.
> Also, the genitive, as I pointed out earlier, does not allow "that."
> These are precisely the positions in which asyndetic relatives are also
> ungrammatical.  There is an extension of this in colloquial speech and in
> non-standard dialects where the gap in the relative clause is filled by a
> resumptive pronoun.  These occur in genitive and comparatives especially,
> although they'll also occur in more complex constructions.  An example
> would be "?I'd like you to meet the poet that we read a lot of her work
> last year."  We certainly would not allow that in formal writing, but it's
> not at all unusual in speech.
>
> The comparative marker "than" acts a lot like a preposition in English,
> and so if we combine it with prepositional phrases, which in this version
> are collapsed with indirect objects, then what we see is that asyndetic
> relatives are blocked only at the lowest level of the hierarchy,
> Genitives.  The fact that "that" can't be dropped if the gap is in subject
> position is a separate phenomenon that is related to language processing
> needs.  Otherwise that-deletion in noun clauses and in relatives is pretty
> much the same rule.  That-relatives and zero-relatives then fall together
> into one subclass of relative clauses that behave differently from
> wh-relatives.
>
> This distinction between that- and wh-relatives reflects the history of
> the language.  Historically, English had only the that-type and asyndetic
> relatives, although the subordinator was "tha" rather than "that."   This
> is a reflection of the strongly paratactic structure of Old English:  not
> a lot of subordination but lots of main clauses in sequence, sometimes
> conjoined by "and."  Old English did not have wh-relatives until the Late
> Old English period when they developed probably from indefinite relatives
> under the influence of Latin, which the scribes of the time knew well.  In
> Latin, relative clauses had to be formed with relative pronouns fully
> inflected for gender, number, and case.  After the Norman Conquest, when
> the tradition of Alfred the Great's English scriptoria was suppressed,
> wh-relatives also disappeared and didn't reappear until the late 13th c.
> when, once again, Latin influenced writers borrowed the structure from
> Latin.  Wh-relatives even today are more strongly a feature of educated
> standard English than of non-standard dialects, which use that- and zero-
> relatives much more.  In fact, wh-relatives are still so much a function
> of formal education and of Standard English that when non-standard
> speakers attempt to use the wh-pronouns to initiate clauses they
> frequently use them in unusual ways, as in sentences like "We were going
> to have a picnic Saturday, which it rained."  Such wh-coordination is not
> at all uncommon in spoken non-standard dialects.
>
> Herb
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Katz, Seth
> Sent: Friday, December 17, 2010 3:04 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Noun clauses
>
> Hey, Herb--
>
> Thanks for recapitulating the argument for that being just a subordinator
> and not a pronoun. You always make me think. A lot. A nice break from
> grading.
>
> Unless I am misunderstanding you, I would note an exception to a claim you
> make.  You say
>
>
> *         It is deletable, like the subordinator "that" and unlike
> pronouns.
>
>
> But the wh-pronouns are deletable in adjective clauses, when the pronoun
> fills the direct object role in the dependent clause, as in
>
> The woman whom you met this morning is an old friend of mine.
> The woman _____ you met this morning is an old friend of mine.
>
> Am I missing something in what you said?
>
> Happy end-of-semester--
> Seth
>
> Dr. Seth Katz
> Assistant Professor
> Department of English
> Bradley University
>
> Faculty Advisor
> Bradley University Hillel
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Stahlke,
> Herbert F.W.
> Sent: Fri 12/17/2010 12:45 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Noun clauses
>
>
>
> John,
>
>
>
> We've had some extensive discussion in past years on the status of "that"
> in clauses like these. There has not been complete agreement on all of it,
> but here's the position I've taken, which is also the position of Otto
> Jespersen in his A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles and
> Huddleston & Pullum in their rather more recent Cambridge Grammar of the
> English Language.
>
>
>
> There are two function words "that" in English.  One is the distal
> demonstrative "that" with its plural "these," and the other is the
> subordinator "that" as found in the clauses you have provided.  When
> "that" is used to introduce a relative clause, it is simply a
> subordinator, not a relative pronoun.  The relative pronouns are the wh-
> words.  This analysis implies that there is a gap in the relative clause
> corresponding to the head noun, so in "The pitches that Casey missed..."
> the gap is in direct object position where "pitches" would be if the
> relative clause were a main clause instead.  If it's the subject that is
> zero, most speakers require "that" to avoid processing problems that arise
> when a second finite verb occurs in a sentence without any overt marking
> that it is in a subordinate clause, so in "The ball that got past Casey
> was a strike" the dropping of "that" would leave "The ball got past Casey
> was a strike" which some speakers will use but writers will avoid.   The
> fact that "that" is required there for clarity is not evidence that it's a
> relative pronoun but simply a restriction on bare or asyndetic relative
> clauses.
>
>
>
> There are several reasons for calling "that" a subordinator in all of its
> non-demonstrative uses.
>
>
>
> *         It's always unstressed, as is the subordinator "that."
> Pronominal and determiner "that" are rarely unstressed.
>
> *         If it were a pronoun in relative clauses, then we would expect
> it to have a plural "those" in "*The pitches those Casey missed...."
>
> *         There is no possessive form, although there is for wh-
> relatives, so we can't say "*The ball that's casing came off...."
>
> *         It is deletable, like the subordinator "that" and unlike
> pronouns.
>
>
>
> There are more argument, and I recommend the treatment in Huddleston &
> Pullum.  There is also a very thorough critique of this analysis by Johan
> van der Auwera in Journal of Linguistics 21 (1985), 149-179 titled
> "Relative that - a centennial dispute.  It's a fascinating, thoughtful,
> and incisive critique.
>
>
>
> Herb
>
>
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of John Chorazy
> Sent: Friday, December 17, 2010 12:21 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Noun clauses
>
>
>
> Hello to all... I've been talking with students (11th grade) about clauses
> and have collected some questions that the list might have some thoughts
> on.
>
> The use of "that" as the head of a noun clause (and subject): "That the
> healthcare system needs fixing is obvious."
>
> "That" used in an adjective phrase: "Unlike the cat that slept all day,
> the dog ran around and barked."
>
> And if we can get some insight to the following use of "that": "Lynn
> Margulis' theory that evolution is a process rather than a competition
> differs dramatically from the theories of most biologists."
>
> Are the last two simply restrictive clauses using the relative pronoun?
>
> Also (a bit different) - anyone care to parse the following? "Should you
> have any trouble identifying the house, just remember that it has a big
> brass knocker on the door." Students see the implied "you" as the subject
> and its verb remember, but not what's going on up front.
>
> Thank you very much!
>
> Sincerely,
>
> John
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> John Chorazy
> English III Academy, Honors, and Academic Pequannock Township High School
>
> Nulla dies sine linea. To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit
> the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
> and select "Join or leave the list"
>
> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>
> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface
> at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or
> leave the list"
>
> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>
>
> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface
> at:
>      http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
> and select "Join or leave the list"
>
> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>
> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface
> at:
>      http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
> and select "Join or leave the list"
>
> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>

To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/