Dick,

Evidence that the surest way to find an example of something in the wild is to say that it doesn't occur!

As you undoubtedly noticed, "thatever" gets 17,600 raw googits, many of which are spacing problems that end up linking subordinator "that" with adverb "ever" as in "the strangest thing that ever happened."  But if you eliminate those, there is still a significant proportion of hits that use "thatever" as an indefinite relative pronoun.  So it does occur and, while not common, isn't at all rare enough to be passed off as a blip in the data.

I take this as another way in which relative "that" is behaving pronominally.  Like genitive "that's," we have morphosyntactic evidence of the change, not just impressionistic judgment.

I just googled "thats" and got over a hundred million hits.  I went through the first hundred, and there was not a single instance of "thats" as a genitive relative pronoun, although I know I've heard it used that way.  Google being what it is, my "thats" search turned up a lot of instances with the apostrophe as well.  I don't know quite what to make of this result.

Herb

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dick Veit
Sent: Monday, December 20, 2010 9:02 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Noun clauses

Herb,

Oddly enough, I found this on a site about grooming Maltese dogs<http://spoiledmaltese.com/forum/51-maltese-grooming/70607-grooming-ahem-male-pee-pee.html>: "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]<mailto:[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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