It came to be yesterday, before I even reviewed my e-mail, that alongside the post-clitic possessive marker ('s) as in "the man smoking quietly's ostentatious pipe" there is also a pre-clitic infinitive marker (to). This clitic is often assumed to mark the infinitive form of the verb. It is never accented, is it. So when we see the so-called split infinitive, we are observing its clitic nature. In such cases it is still not accented but can be seen to be attached to the whole verb phrase, not just the bare verb form -- "to boldly go." Similarly when the adverb particle "not" splits it away: "I wanted to not fall" as more colloquial for "I wanted not to fall" or more precise than "I didn't want to fall."
Bruce
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of STAHLKE, HERBERT F
Sent: Monday, January 19, 2009 6:21 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Pedants that or who?
I think I should say a little more about clitics, a term that isn't particularly widely used among writing teachers and school grammar teachers. Of course, those who have studied the grammar of, say, a Romance language, Latin, Greek, or a Slavic language will be familiar with the term. If we start with Leonard Bloomfield's structural definition of "word" as "minimal free form," we can then talk about how word-like a form is. There are, of course, more contemporary definitions of word that involve a lot more contemporary morphosyntactic theory, but I've found Bloomfield's to be a good starting point. A word, as a minimal free form, is the smallest thing that you can extract from a spoken utterance and still say it without changing its phonology or morphology. So, for the non-phonetically trained English speaker, in the spoken sentence "The ball's in play," the only words are "ball" and "play." To pronounce "the" or "in" in isolation, we'll change "the" from /D@/ (ASCII IPA transcription) to /'DV/ (stressed and with the same vowel as in "bud"). In other words, we have to change its pronunciation. In the spoken sentence, "in" reduces to a syllabic /m/. To pronounce it in isolation we have to change it to /'In/. In English we can't pronounce any syllable by itself without stressing it, and stress will often change the vowel sound. So in that utterance, /D@/ and /m,/ are not words. They can't be pronounced, as they are, in isolation. But they are also not affixes. Rather, they are clitics, forms that attach to grammatical structures, not to word stems. The same, by the way, is true of the contracted 's form. It's not an affix but a clitic. On the other hand, in "The balls are bouncing," -s and -ing are both affixes. They attach, respectively, only to a noun stem and a verb stem. There are smaller parts of a word that we don't normally analyze separately, phonaesthetic forms like the "gl" of glow/glimmer/glisten/glare and many other words having to do with giving off light. We also don't analyze as separate units the vowel changes (ablaut) in strong verbs, like come/came, run/ran, etc.
Clitic is not a term that does a lot of heavy lifting in English grammar, unlike in Spanish, but it is a useful distinction between affix and word.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of STAHLKE, HERBERT F
Sent: 2009-01-19 19:24
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Pedants that or who?
This thread has teased out some of the complexity surrounding "that." No one has mentioned the demonstrative, which is the direct descendant of the OE form "thaette" that Edith notes, and I think we're all agreed that the demonstrative and the conjunction are distinct forms.
The one formal argument for pronoun status of relative-that is the fact that children and some non-standard dialects do have the form written as "that's." appending the genitive marker to the form in question. This is not, however, a particularly strong argument because, as Arnold Zwicky has demonstrated elsewhere, the -'s genitive is not an affix but a clitic. Clitics are forms that typically attach to phrases, not to word stems. Affixes attach to word stems. The fact that we can say "the Queen of England's decision" demonstrates that -'s attaches, here, to a nominal construction, not to a noun stem. The fact, then, that for some speakers it can attach to the subordinator "that" simply means that for them it's behaving like a clitic, not like an affix.
Bill's concern over zero forms is well-founded. We don't want to proliferate zero forms every time we run into an anomalous distribution, which we certainly have in that and wh- relative clauses. However, I would dispute, or at least strongly question, the claim that the absence of "that" in an RC represents a deletion. That certainly doesn't reflect the historical facts, although the contemporary behavior of something doesn't necessarily have to reflect closely its historical development. I'd argue rather that asyndetic (unconnected) and that-marked relatives are simply two options--no zero involved here.
As to the feeling that rel-that is pronominal, I suspect this is influenced in part by the syncretism with the demonstrative, which is quite a different form. It is, for one thing, nearly always stressed, and the subordinator is almost never stressed. As far as Craig's example of a "that it" relative construction, where the "it" is a resumptive pronoun, resumptives in subject position are particularly problematical. They tend to occur, when they do, only in those places where "that" can't occur. In subject position we're more likely to delete where the subject of the relative is coreferential with the head noun. And that makes it very much like other subject deletions in dependent structures in English.
In response to Dick's query about complementarity, wh- and that historically were not complementary. In fact, in late Middle English and Early Modern English the two typically occurred together. In fact, "that" occurred regularly after what we now consider adverbial subordinating conjunctions, so that expressions like "which that," "who that,"when that," and "if that (see the Sydney sonnet I posted not too long back)," etc. were the rule. We still have reflexes of this in "now that" and "except that." Over time, as we get into Late Modern English, the sense that the "that" is needed to mark subordination diminishes and the pronoun or adverb takes on that function itself.
I understand the feeling that relative that is pronominal; I just haven't seen any evidence for it.
Herb
Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
[log in to unmask]
________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Wollin, Edith [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: January 19, 2009 4:02 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Pedants that or who?
I am prefacing my addition to this line of inquiry with the statement that I know next to nothing about Old English. However, I do know enough to have a nagging remembrance that there are different that's in Old English. So I have finally pulled out my old Old English dictionary and here is what I have found: "thaet" is a conjunction and an adverb pretty much meaning "that." Thaette" is a pronoun meaning which and that which and a conjunction meaning that, so that, in order that.
Am I wrong in wondering if we still have two "thats"; they just look exactly the same now. It does seem to me that "that" has to be functioning as a relative pronoun in the sentences we are looking at. I guess the next thing is to check Old English syntax to see what we find there. --Maybe next week!
Ediht Wollin
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Spruiell, William C
Sent: Mon 1/19/2009 11:43 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Cc:
Subject: Re: Pedants that or who?
Herb, Dick, et al.:
Like Dick, I feel I instinctively resist Herb's analysis on this one,
although it's a perfectly logical analysis. We've had part of this
conversation on the list before, I know, but I've lost track of which
comments I've already made, so apologies for any duplication. I've been
trying to pin down *why* I'm having this reaction. In addition to the
"But...but....I learned it different!" motivation, I think I've
identified two more (I'd like to emphasize at this point that, while I'm
going to argue with the analysis, there's no sense in which I could
claim it's "wrong"; instead, I'm tossing out a contrary argument partly
to see where the flaws in my own reasoning might be):
(1) I'm nervous about multiplying zero elements. While it's true we have
relative clauses with no relativizer at all, I don't even want to say
there's really a zero in those (I'd prefer to say that the occurrence of
an element like an NP in an otherwise-ungrammatical position cues the
hearer that an embedded clause is beginning). If I follow Herb's
analysis correctly, I have no way of ruling out an additional step in
which I could claim that the "no relativizer" clauses actually have TWO
zeroes -- the usual one that stands in for the missing element, and an
initial one that's the zero-allomorph of conjunctive 'that'. Then I
start seeing zero elements everywhere.
(2) This is one that *badly* needs corroboration, but....I've heard
people slip up and use a possessive marker on 'that' when it's standing
where a 'whose' would normally go ("We took the car that's door lock is
busted"). If I'm right about that, it would be evidence that at least
some speakers are processing 'that' as if it's a nominal element.
Sincerely,
Bill Spruiell
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Veit, Richard
Sent: Sunday, January 18, 2009 11:55 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Pedants that or who?
Herb,
I understand that "that" has a different origin from the wh-relative
pronouns, and I understand that there are restrictions on "that" which
are not placed on wh-relative pronouns (e.g., "that" doesn't occur after
prepositions, and "that" occurs only in restrictive relatives).
Nevertheless, it's hard for me to get around my intuition that "that" is
acting as a pronoun. For me, in "the dog who barked" and "the dog that
barked," "who" and "that" don't feel different, and both seem to
function as the verb's subject.
Also, if "that" is a conjunction and cannot fill a subject or object
slot, and if "who" is a pronoun and can fill those slots, why are "that"
and "who" mutually exclusive in a relative clause? Why can't we get "the
dog that who barked"? Are there any other instances in the grammar where
words of different grammatical categories and functions occur mutually
exclusively in the same position?
Finally, don't lots of children say things like "the boy that's mother
drove him"?
Dick
________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of STAHLKE, HERBERT F
[[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Sunday, January 18, 2009 1:56 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Pedants that or who?
Dick,
I'm saying that the verb has a zero subject. Many speakers find such
sentences acceptable in speech, as in "There's the guy met me at the
airport." Whether one accepts such a spoken sentence or not, it does
have a zero subject. So in that-relatives, the co-indexed noun in the
RC deletes. In those cases where deletion is prevented by other
factors, as with possessives or fronted PPs that-relatives aren't
allowed and wh-rels get used. For many speakers those positions that
don't allow deletion show up with resumptive pronouns, as in "The guy
that I talked to his brother yesterday lives in Indianapolis."
Herb
Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
[log in to unmask]
________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Veit, Richard [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: January 18, 2009 10:50 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Pedants that or who?
Herb,
I know you have made this case, but I'd like to hear more. In "the dog
who barked," who is a pronoun and the subject of the relative clause.
Are you saying that, in "the dog that barked," the verb barked has no
subject? Or are you saying that a conjunction can be the subject? Or
something else entirely?
Dick
________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of STAHLKE, HERBERT F
[[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Saturday, January 17, 2009 4:11 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Pedants that or who?
We've discussed that vs. who at great length on this list, and I've made
the argument, based on grammarians like Jespersen and Huddleston&Pullum,
that the claim of a distinction of humanness is false. Relative-that is
not a pronoun; it's a subordinating conjunction, the same as it is with
noun clauses. Because it isn't a pronoun, it can't agree grammatically.
Conjunctions in English don't. "Who," on the other hand, is a pronoun
with human reference. The "that" form goes back to Old English. The
"wh-" forms in their modern form arise in Middle English after the 13th
c.
Herb
Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
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