I came across another bit from Jespersen
that offers some historical insight into the presence and absence of “that”.
He’s speaking of content clauses, but the same applies pretty much to
relative clauses:
In combinations like “I think he is
dead” it is historically wrong to say that the conjunction that is omitted. Both “I think he
is dead” and “I think that he is dead” are evolved out of
original parataxis of two independent sentences: “I think: he is dead”
and “I think that: he is dead”. In the second the word that, which was originally the
demonstrative pronoun, was accentually weakened, as shown also in the vowel,
which is now usually [@] (schwa) and not [ae] as in the demonstrative pronoun,
and this weakened that came to be
felt to belong to the clause instead of, as originally , to what preceded, i.
e. it became a “conjunction”.
He goes on with some further very
interesting discussion, but I’ll leave that to others to look up if it
interests them.
Herb
Bill,
The examples you
give are all what I have called the declarative noun clause. The key to
understanding the distribution is to realize that such a clause may appear
in the same uses as a noun phrase. Just as there are occasions when the
noun phrase is used adverbially, so the DecNC may appear in such
structures. The connective for the DecNC is "that."
(A) i. The proposal did not address
budgetary concerns.
(A) m. It was problematic in this
regard.
The matrix uses a prepostional phrase adverbially.
(B) i. The proposal did not
address budgetary concerns. (= A i )
(B) m. It was acceptable
except for this fact.
Here the adverb "except" is complemented by a
prepositional phrase. As is quite common, the DecNC dissolves the
preposition of a complement. Compare,
John was sorry that it did not address
budgetary concerns.
m. John was sorry about this fact.
Notice also that the noun "fact" is often
appropriate to express the way the content of the clause is to be
regarded. The last example is reduced from a compound sentence. The
matrix would be:
(C) m. There was no question about
it.
The compound sentence using the adversative requires a
contrast; the negative in the first sentence would be one of these:
(C) i1. The proposal may
have addressed budgetary concerns. (conceivably)
(C) i2. The proposal did not address
budgetary concerns. (= A i)
(C) i. The proposal may
have addressed budgetary concerns, but it did not.
(C) i'. It may have, but the proposal
did not address budgetary concerns.
The matrix then takes the DecNC with the first part of the
imbed understood. I think that each of these phenomena need to be
explained independently, before the full construction can be explained
fully. Maybe this way of looking at the structure will help.
Bruce.
>>> [log in to unmask] 3/15/2005 4:10:35 PM >>>
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/
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This message may contain confidential information, and is
intended only for the use of the individual(s) to whom it
is addressed.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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/ 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/
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This message may contain confidential information, and is
intended only for the use of the individual(s) to whom it
is addressed.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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/