Herb,
I think that an
argument can be made for a distinction between A-B on the one hand, and C on
the other (they aren’t completely parallel, so the distinction may be
vacuous, but it’s a start):
(A) The proposal was problematic in that
it did not address budgetary concerns.
(B) The proposal was acceptable except
that it did not address budgetary concerns.
(C) There was no question but that the
proposal did not address budgetary concerns.
Removing the “X that” constituent
yields the following:
(A’) The proposal
was problematic.
(B’) The proposal was acceptable.
(C’) There was no question.
The “but that” expression in C
seems to be pinning down the meaning of “question” in a way that’s
much more crucial to the interpretation of the sentence than the expressions in
A and B pin down the meaning of what they modify –
i.e., I can see the “but that” expression as acting much more like
a restrictive relative (“Which question?). Of course, A and B have
adjectives, rather than nouns, which may be causing the difference. The only
examples of “in that” I could devise in which it modified a noun
involved assignment to categories:
The
platypus is a typical mammal in that it provides milk to its young, but is an
atypical mammal in that it lays eggs.
I don’t think the “in that”
construction is modifying “mammal” in this case the same way “but
that” modifies “question” in the earlier one. In this type of
example an adjectival constituent (“[is] typically mammalian”) can
be substituted for the nominal version without much change in meaning; the same
kind of substitution (question à questionable) won’t work with C.
Again, I’m honestly not sure what
this means, if anything at all – it’s an interesting construction,
and I’m just gnawing on it (if I live to be ninety, I think I’ll
still be encountering constructions I never really thought about closely before).
As you pointed out, it’s “fossilized” to large extent, and
could be expected to be anomalous. I’m just wondering if this is the kind
of case that led Curme to
class “but that” as a relativizer.
Bill Spruiell
From:
Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2005 2:18
PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: which and that
Bill,
How about “in that S” or
“except that S”? Those are the only other ones I can think of
at the moment. The distribution of “that” has interested me
for some time, and there used to be a lot more possibilities, “after that
S”, “because that S”. I think the head word had more of
a prepositional or adverbial function and the “that” was necessary
to mark the subordination, but as we get into Modern and Late Modern English,
the subordinating function gets subsumed by the head and the “that”
disappears. “In that”, “but that”, and
“except that” are relics left over by this change.
Herb
From:
Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2005 1:28
PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: which and that
Herb –
That sounds perfectly reasonable to me
(for one thing, I can think of plenty of examples with regular nouns after the but). I was just casting about for
something that could potentially be analyzed as a
relative (and again, I hadn’t really thought about that kind of
construction before). Playing devil’s advocate, though – what other
prepositional phrases allow a ‘that’-clause as an object? All the
ones I can think of off the top of my head require an additional
“which,” yielding a different structure (about that which X, for
that which X, etc.). Could this type of construction be limited enough that
Curme thought it better to deal with it as a relative than as a PP?
The only other examples I’ve found
so far in FROWN involved clear cases of but
coordinating two that-clauses, but I haven’t checked any
nineteenth-century material yet.
Bill Spruiell
From:
Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2005 1:17
PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: which and that
I think this comes about in a different
way. As English was developing a whole array of subordinators, it used
most of them with “that”. In Middle English and Early Modern
English combinations like “which that” “because that”,
etc. were common. We keep just a few of them in Modern English, like
“except that”, “now that”, and a few others. But
in all other cases the “that” has disappeared. I’d
argue here that “but” in your sentence is a preposition with a
that-clause as its object.
Herb
From:
Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2005 1:10
PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: which and that
I’ve been trying to find relative
examples of “but that” in some of the corpora I have. I
haven’t run across a firm example yet, but I did run across the
following, which I hadn’t really thought about before, and am now
wondering how to analyze (FROWN J31 134-5):
There can be no question [[but that]] this resistance emanates from
his ego ....
This
doesn’t seem like a relative clause to me, but
it’s…..relativish.
Bill
Spruiell
Dept. of
English
From:
Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2005 9:20
AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: which and that
Here’s an example from Dickens of
“as” as a relative pronoun. Sam Weller says, “…the
turnkeys takes wery good care to seize hold o' ev'ry body but them as pays 'em…”
I’d like to see some
“but” and “but that” examples.
________________________
Richard Veit
Department of English, UNCW
910-962-3324
-----Original Message-----
From:
Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2005 8:51
AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: which and that
Here’s another take
on relative pronouns. I happened to be checking Curme’s Parts of Speech and Accidence this
morning, on another matter entirely, when I came across the following in a
section headed “Relative Pronouns with Antecedent”:
“These relative
pronouns are who, which, that, as, but, but
that, but what (colloquial), the indefinites whoever, whatever, and whichever, and other less common forms
enumerated in [his Syntax, the
other part of Curme and Kurath’s A
Grammar of the English Language (HFWS].”
I suspect we could get into
an interesting discussion of “as”, “but”, and
“but that”.
Herb
TEG's web site at http://ateg.org/