Bill,

Sorry to be so slow responding.  I swore ten years ago that I’d never again get pulled into administration, so here I am directing graduate programs in English.  My own fault.

Here are some examples from Jespersen (Part III, 168-192).

As (all quoted from literature, those not used with such or so tend to be archaic)

Such women as Tom knew

You are fleeing the same desperate enemy as we are.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on.

Poor wretch as I was

He is a brave man, as are all of his house.

But (negative relative connective, all pretty much archaic sounding)

There is not a touch of Vandyck’s pencil but he seems to have reveled on.

Scarcely a locality but has its history of fortunes thrown away over some impossible project.

She had no nurses in her business but what were very good.

Of all of these, only the same…as and such…as examples sound remotely modern.  But J points out that as-relatives start appearing in the 12^th c., the very beginnings of Middle English, and some of his but examples are also quite old, so these constructions have considerable history in English.  They’ve diminished over the past century and a half or so.

His “but that” examples are in his book titled Negation, which I don’t have a copy of.

Herb

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

Central Michigan University

 

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.

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Stahlke, Herbert F.W.
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