Herb,

Oddly enough, I found this on a site about grooming Maltese dogs: "Then take his two front paws in one hand. Raise your hand carefully until his underside is "get-at-able" then very carefully perform thatever i[t] is you intend to do."

Dick

On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 7:41 PM, STAHLKE, HERBERT F <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Craig,

The pattern you illustrate below is certainly true of Standard English.  However, in colloquial speech and in non-ztandard varieties of English "that" is dropped regularly before 0 subjects in relatives.  I hear people say things like "Anyone/thing touches you touches me" fairly regularly.  This syntactic change is taking place because that's outside the relative clause, just as it's outside the content clause.  If it were a pronoun and perceived as a pronoun cognitively, then I would also expect to hear things like "Thatever gambles loses" along with "Whoever gambles loses."  But that's one I don't hear.   The fact that "that" doesn't delete before a 0 subject relative clause in Formal Standard English reflects the conservatism of that dialect.

Herb

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