Herb,
Can you give us, in summary form, the morpho-syntactic criteria that
would lead you to categorize something as a pronoun? I think the
problem may just come down to a difference in definitions.
Craig >
Bruce,
>
> Let me assure you that these sentences do occur, and not as false starts
> or interruptions.
>
> I share your concern that I may have been assuming the answer, but I keep
> getting driven back, by the data, to the fact that there is simply no
> evidence that this thing is or ever was pronominal. I hate burden of
> proof claims, but if there is evidence, morphosyntactic evidence, since
> that's the only kind we can observe, I'd like to see it.
>
> Herb
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bruce Despain
> Sent: 2009-01-23 15:03
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Pedants that or who?
>
> Herb,
>
> The third example, "There's this guy ... met me at the airport" is very
> strange to me. Sorry, I may have heard it, but interpreted (or
> re-interpreted) it to be a false start: "There's this guy. (He) met me at
> the airport, ..." I'm waiting to hear more of the story, expecting the
> excited speaker to drop more resumptive pronouns in the process: "There's
> the guy, met me at the airport, got me in this scam." The occurrence
> seems marginal to me.
>
> You're right about the origin being more important that the (chance)
> identity of the replacement with a word already being used in the language
> as a demonstrative pronoun. I agree that the demonstrative meaning was
> lost, but the pronominal use is still there, is it not? Certainly its
> lack of stress reinforces the view that it was not a demonstrative, but
> how can that make it lose a pronominal use? You seem to be saying that
> the OE conjunction changed its identity to "that" maybe by analogy, but
> cannot have acquired any of its meaning by the same process. Yet you even
> use the word "replace." Maybe if I'm begging the question, you would
> maybe be assuming the answer?
>
> Bruce
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of STAHLKE, HERBERT F
> Sent: Friday, January 23, 2009 12:00 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Pedants that or who?
>
> Bruce,
>
> I cut my syntactic teeth on serial verbs, planning then to do my
> dissertation on them. It was enough of a problem to persuade me to shift
> to phonology.
>
> These "double zero" constructions, to coin a phrase, also occur in places
> where they can't possibly be interruptions, and I don't think the relative
> clause cases I've cited are either, but consider existentials:
>
> There's this guy that/0 I met 0 at the coffee shop.
> There's this guy that/0 I talked to 0 at the coffee shop.
> There's this guy that/0 0 met me at the airport.
>
> I've used 0s to specify slots for "that" and for the deleted NP. The last
> example, the subject instance, is not an interruption. It's simply a
> relative clause in an existential sentence, and you might hear something
> like this more frequently than the other example I gave.
>
> Your discussion of the question of "that" as a pronominal begs the
> question (in the logical sense, not the modern talking head sense). It
> makes the assumption that conjunctive "that" started life as determiner
> "that." There's no evidence that this was the case. Rather, this use of
> "that" replace what in OE and EME was "þa," a particle that had an
> adverbial and grammatical function. It actually could introduce relative
> clauses, although those were more likely to be asyndetic in keeping with
> OE generally paratactic structure. You might argue that it was the
> demonstrative that replaced the indeclinable particle in subordinate
> clauses, but I think more important is what it took the place of, not what
> it started life as. By the time the replacement happened it was pretty
> much a reduced form, unlike the pronoun. If it shifted as a pronoun, I
> would expect its plural to shift with it, but we never find any form like
> "these" introducing relatives. It's in this purely grammatical role of
> subordinator that it combines with adverbs, pronouns, and prepositions to
> form compound subordinators that have, in most cases, dropped the "that"
> altogether today.
>
> The loss of use of "whom" I think rather reflects that it was fairly late
> to make the shift from interrogative pronoun to relative and never really
> got established in the grammar in the first place. So its shaky status
> today is a reflection of its shaky history.
>
> Herb
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bruce Despain
> Sent: 2009-01-23 10:50
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Pedants that or who?
>
> Herb,
>
> Thanks for the clarification. I stand corrected on the serial verbs. The
> closest thing we have, I believe, is "I'll try and make it," where there
> is a definite tendency to "correct" it to "I'll try to make it." The
> multibranching structure is formal-theoretically distinct from the
> right-branching "correction." The semantics does not need to branch.
> The point I was getting at had to do with the use of "to" as an infinitive
> marker being sublimated (lenition?) with modal auxiliaries, but being
> restored in periphrasis.
>
> Your sentences still seem contrived to me. I guess I'll have to listen
> more closely, instead of assuming, or overlooking what seems to me to be
> performance problems. The intonation is characteristic of the
> parenthetical insertions that Craig used to separate the RC from its
> antecedent. These items seem to be freely inserted between main
> constituents, but sometimes inserted even within a word, when emphasis is
> required. Maybe it's the same thing, maybe not. When can sentences be
> interrupted by other sentences and become grammaticalized as dependent
> structures? Do resumptive pronouns become grammaticalized? Maybe that's
> what's happening.
>
> There must be some other motivating factors involved with the construction
> of an argument to support the rejection of "that" as a relative pronoun.
> I cannot think that its lack of morphosyntactic marking could be a strong
> point. Doesn't the loss of the use of "whom" as a marked variant of "who"
> tells us that such marking is not really all that important. The
> conjunctive (and relative) "than" was originally the same word as "then"
> (not usually relative) but got differentiated in the course of time. The
> fact that "that" has not been differentiated (yet) cannot be terribly
> important to its present use.
>
> Bruce
>
>
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of STAHLKE, HERBERT F
> Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2009 10:19 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Pedants that or who?
>
> Bruce,
>
> You raised doubts about the relevance of phonological phenomena to
> grammatical change, hence my second paragraph.
>
> As to serial verbs, in the languages that attest them, principally in West
> Africa, Southeast Asia, and New Guinea, serial verb constructions are
> considerably different from our auxiliary verb structures. A typical
> example from Yoruba is, without tones and some vowel contrasts since I
> can't do them in email,
>
> Mo gbe eran lo si ile se jeun
> I picked-up meat went to house cooked ate
> I brought meat home, cooked, and ate it.
>
> Gbe, lo, si, se, and jeun are all verbs, all finite verbs, and there is no
> morphosyntactic marking of relationships among them beyond the iconicity
> of word order. Serial verb constructions don't involve subordination or
> coordination, and may include grammaticized forms like modals and
> aspectuals but typically those forms exhibit other constraints. Basically
> serial verb constructions use verbs to express the grammatical roles
> English uses word order and prepositions for and also allows expression of
> multiple events in a single sentence. I don't think English modals,
> periphrastic or simple, fit these patterns well. English auxiliaries also
> exhibit a right branching dependency structure that shows up especially
> placement of contrastive negation and in the logic of multiple negatives.
> Serial verbs do not exhibit a dependency structure.
>
> As to sentences subject relatives but no "that" and no subject, these are
> not contrived. They occur in spoken discourse. Usually there is
> intonational marking of the relative clause, but no syntactic marking. In
> formal syntax, even wh-relatives are treated as having zero elements
> marked by traces in the canonical positions for those constituents. The
> wh-word moves to a COMP node and so is not in the clause itself. I'm not
> sure how the latest in formal syntax does that, but it's a variant of
> this.
>
> All of which gets us back to the question of whether "that" is pronominal
> in relative clauses. I'm not sure how it's simpler to call it a pronoun,
> except perhaps in a pedagogical sense. I can see the need to simplify the
> description of certain areas of grammatical structure, including
> participle/gerund constructions, infinitival constructions, and relative
> clauses, and I don't object to such pedagogical measures. We've all
> needed them. I object rather to making category membership claims
> without morphosynactic evidence to support them, and this evidence is
> absent in the case of relative "that." I've looked for it, and it's not
> there.
>
> Herb
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bruce Despain
> Sent: 2009-01-22 15:19
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Pedants that or who?
>
> Herb,
>
> I agree completely with your first paragraph. The second seems a little
> off track but does lead to the third, of which I must remain to be
> convinced. It seems that the term "zero anaphora" is another way of
> saying that there is no "relative" when one seems to be needed when
> compared to other similar constructions. Serial verbs abound in English,
> yet they are traditionally called simple modal auxiliaries and
> periphrastic modals. Maybe it is not yet appropriate in the development
> of English to make a separate category for them. There is certainly a
> zero DO in an adjective clause, but when the conjunction "that" is used,
> it's much simpler to call it a pronoun, especially when "that" regularly
> appears when not a DO and a relative is expected. It's possible origin as
> the marker of a content clause, which never was relative, hardly seems
> relevant to its present use. It appeared with adverbs and pronouns that
> were relative, but had no relative meaning to transfer to them. The
> sentences you cite for Craig with the null sign marking the place of a
> subject seem very contrived to me. If we can take performance errors as
> evidence for a living construction (or even a dead one), the sky is the
> only limit to the analysis.
>
> Bruce
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of STAHLKE, HERBERT F
> Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2009 11:38 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Pedants that or who?
>
> Bruce,
>
> You made your point well. However, I think that in Late Middle and Early
> Modern English the function of "that" in these subordinator+that
> combinations, for want of a better term, was to provide a clear marker of
> subordination. It hadn't been that long that question words had been used
> in relative clauses, or for that matter, that adverbial subordinate
> clauses developed to the level of richness they have today, and I suspect
> that the "that" was felt necessary because the inchoate subordinator
> wasn't yet felt to be fully a subordinator.
>
> There is a complex interaction between phonological change and grammatical
> change. Just look at how OE lost its noun case system, by weakening of
> final syllables. That final lenition traces its roots back to the
> Germanic Stress Shift that was part of Verner's Law. When Germanic accent
> shifted from movable, as in most of Indo-European, to fixed and initial,
> it triggered a whole chain of effects, one of the most of important of
> which was final lenition. As English lost its noun case endings, its
> syntax changed from mixed SOV/SVO to almost completely SVO and with a much
> more fixed order of constituents than in OE. Also prepositions began to
> proliferate as ways to mark relationships that could no longer be marked
> by case endings. I suspect, although I have not looked carefully at
> corpus data on it, that the loss of "that" in the combinations we're
> talking about was very much the same sort of phenomenon.
>
> By the way, I think you're right the "whom that" is not, or at most,
> rarely attested. I would suspect that this is because of the relatively
> late entry of "whom" as a relative pronoun, after "that" had already begun
> to disappear.
>
> Obviously I would disagree with you that "that" can "hold the place of the
> direct object." I would hold that in such relative clauses, the DO is
> zero, another instance of zero anaphora. Lest anyone fear that I'm
> proliferating zero anaphora beyond reason, I would suggest looking at
> Chinese, Vietnamese, Yoruba, or other languages with serial verb
> constructions, where zero anaphora abounds.
>
> Herb
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bruce Despain
> Sent: 2009-01-22 10:54
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Pedants that or who?
>
> Herb,
>
> I hope you understood my point in composing the "at a time when that"
> structure. I was trying to say that such a monstrosity would not have
> even occurred to the 16th c. mind. My proposal was that the phrase "when
> that" would not have been made a relative to "time" possibly because the
> "that" was already relative to the "when." The fact that "that" became a
> clitic in certain positions does not seem relevant to its occurrence as a
> relative. The fact that clitics tend to be phonologically dependent does
> not seem to be the same thing as a relative blending when in construction
> with the p/a/p. The "that" that disappears from an RC where it may hold
> the place of the object of a transitive verb, still does not seem to be
> the same as the "that" that introduces content clauses. The disappearance
> of the "that" of content clauses seems restricted to non-relative p/a/p.
> I could be wrong, but I suspect that the construction, *"the man whom that
> they elected" cannot be attested. I think such a construction would go a
> long way in making your argument sustainable (at least to me).
>
> Bruce
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of STAHLKE, HERBERT F
> Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2009 3:31 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Pedants that or who?
>
> Bruce,
>
> I appreciate your caution on what we call a unit. I'm equally
> uncomfortable with calling some things compounds, although not so much in
> the case of prepositions. Certainly "a piece of" functions as a
> partitive, in which "of" marks the partitive structure, while at the same
> time of+NP is the complement of "a piece." So cases of strings that
> behave as units are not uncommon, nor is it rare for syntactic structure
> and sense or phonological phrasing to conflict. To use the "piece"
> example again, phonologically we break "a piece of pie" into /@pis@ pai/,
> that is, "of" cliticizes to "piece," not to "pie," which is its sister
> constituent in the prepositional phrase.
>
> I agree that "at a time when that" would have sounded redundant, probably
> even odd, to a 16th c. ear. I suspect, especially on the frequency of
> occurrence of "that" with a pronoun/adverb/preposition to introduce a
> subordinate clause means that "that" cliticized to that p/a/p. It then
> dropped from most combinations because clitic forms are unstressed and
> therefore easily undergo lenition.
>
> Herb
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bruce Despain
> Sent: 2009-01-21 10:34
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Pedants that or who?
>
> Herb,
>
> I mentioned "so that," where the meaning of "so" is adverbial but the
> meaning of "that" is to introduce an adverbial noun clause. The use of
> "now that" would be of the same ilk. This adverb "so" and this adverb
> "now" have complements that are relative, in that they refer back to their
> adverb antecedent. The "when that" seems on the surface to be a
> construction of the same sort. However, "when" is never an independent
> (non-relative and non-connective) adverb. I suspect that the relative use
> of "that" with an adverb like "now" grew out of its use as a relative
> pronoun and was distinct from its rather independent use as object of a
> preposition "in" (cf. a few sentences back) or conjunction "when." The
> time clause introduced by "when" is adverbial together with the noun
> clause, which is not. I suspect that the sentence, "William attacked at a
> time when that the kingdom was at peace" would have sounded redundant (two
> relatives) even to the medieval ear. "William attacked when that the
> kingdom was at peace" has none of the relative import of the former, and
> probably sounded much more natural.
>
> I think that the practice of analyzing multiple words as "units" can be
> misleading. We speak of compound prepositions and such, but the desire
> seems to be to divorce morphology from syntax. The clumping of units as
> wholes without syntactic significance can have the effect of sweeping
> important details under the rug. Some might be inclined to say that "kick
> the bucket" is not syntactically analyzable. But we can say "kicking the
> proverbial bucket" so that the "unit" has been taken apart. Its meaning as
> a whole has been modified by placing a modifier (relational adjective)
> next to a part of it. I guess this connects to the clitic discussion as
> well as the one on the pedagogy of science.
>
> Bruce
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of STAHLKE, HERBERT F
> Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2009 5:26 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Pedants that or who?
>
> Bruce,
>
> That's an interesting parallel. But what about "now that Obama is
> president," which is clearly an adverbial use but not with a preposition.
> But I'm making the diachronic assumption that "now that" is a unit, just
> as "when" is, now that we no longer say "when that."
>
> As to "the man that was smoking," I think that does reflect the
> demonstrative character of articles in OE and ME, at least EME, and it's a
> modern reflex of that demonstrative function. As definite articles have
> undergone lenition and have reduced to a single form, the different
> functions have gotten mixed together.
>
> Herb
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bruce Despain
> Sent: 2009-01-20 12:40
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Pedants that or who?
>
> On the point that a relative "that" cannot be constructed with a
> preposition consider that your content-clause complementizer has the same
> characteristic. "He decided on it" - "He decided that they had arrived."
> The verb "decide" needs to have the prepositional particle for its
> complement, but the presence of the noun clause excludes the appearance of
> the particle. The RC, which is usually adjectival, doesn't normally need
> a preposition. However, the RC may be adverbial, in which case the
> preposition precedes it. Can't we say that the adjective clause
> introduced by "that" simply can't be used adverbially? The clauses
> introduced by "that" are noun or adjective.
>
> I've mentioned on the list before that the clause we call relative has
> multiple functions and that there are adverbial clauses of degree and
> comparison that are relative without the relative pronouns, but with
> relative adverbs instead. The adverb "so" is often complemented with a
> "that" clause, so much so that "that" seems to be serving as a relative
> adverb. The adverb "more" (and the comparative -er) is complemented with
> a "than" clause, which "than" must be serving adverbially. These
> conjunctions seem to be just as much relative (adverbs) as are the
> relative (pronouns) of the RC. Also the two "as" in this last sentence
> are co-relative; the second has the other as an antecedent to which it
> refers. The first one could be referring back to something in the context
> of the utterance until we hear the second one. This is very much like the
> "the" in "the man who is smoking." "The" could be referring back in
> context until the relative clause comes along. This kind of behavior on
> the part of "the" is what gives us the relative meaning in "the man that
> is smoking." It looks to me for all the world like a relative
> demonstrative pronoun.
>
> Bruce
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
> Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2009 9:23 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Pedants that or who?
>
> Herb,
> I'm a little uncomfortable with the notion that we have to base our
> "science" totally on formal observations and that observations about
> what something seems to mean are "naive." That may be the writing
> teacher speaking. It may also be from a growing interest in cognitive
> lenses. But I'm not ready for a full defense yet.
> I guess what I'm holding out for, not so much from you but from my
> fellow public grammarians, is a much clearer differentiation between
> "that" in a content clause and "that" in a relative clause. You and I
> seem close on that, but then you draw back from saying there's a
> possibility of a third "that" and I'm still ruminating.
> I don't mean to replace your thoughtful phrasing for all this, but
> here's what I would tell my grammar class students. In a relative
> clause, the nominal group being "modified" has a role within the
> modifying clause. The marker (relative pronoun?) helps us establish
> that role. This doesn't happen in a content clause, where the
> subordinator (I call it a complementizer) simply stands outside the
> clause. This complementizing even happens in some clauses that seem
> relative by position, but turn out to be structurally different.
> "He believes that the aliens have landed." "His belief that the aliens
> have landed is absurd." In neither of these is "belief" or a pronoun
> stand-in functioning within the subordinate clause. to me, these are
> complements rather than modifiers.
> "The aliens that have landed are green." In this case, aliens have done
> the landing and it's these specific aliens that are green. This is what
> feels pronominal to many of us, but could be explained thoughtfully as
> a subordinating stand-in for an absent subject.
> I think we are both in full agreement to this point. I'm still leaning
> toward calling the clause itself a "relative clause" even if it turns
> out "that" isn't acting pronominally in the full sense of the word. For
> pedagogical reasons, certainly, that makes the most sense. For
> pedagogical reasons, it might also be less confusing to say that the
> "relative pronouns" that help us out in these clauses all act a bit
> differently. (I would include "where" and "when". "The place where I
> was born." "The time when I'm most alert.")
> Certainly the fact that we can say "the dresser in which I keep my
> socks" but not "the dresser in that I keep my socks" gives me deep
> pause.
> I have to admit that the more we discuss this, the clearer your
> position becomes. Could it be that "that", because it is both
> subordinator and pronoun in other instances, can be acting in ways here
> that are very unique?
> If it feels like a subject, can it become one over time?
> Ultimately, it is more useful to agree on how something acts than it is
> to agree on classification, since classification categories can change
> with a change in definition. I think I'm arguing for a more fluid
> definition for pronoun, in part because it still feels to me that the
> "that" that shows up in these clauses is different from the other two,
> the subordinator and the demonstrative.
> Again, though, I thank you for leading us patiently toward the light.
> That I agree with you more and more as time goes on should tell me
> something.
>
> Craig
>
>
>
> STAHLKE, HERBERT F wrote:
>
> Craig,
>
>
>
> My point was that while we do still use "that" after "except," "now," and
> a few other adverbs it used to have a much broader distribution. It was
> used regularly with another word (since, if, when, while, which, etc.) to
> form show subordination, and the use of "that" in such cases was quite
> consistent. In LME, on the other hand, that use in combination with a
> content word to mark subordination has become restricted to just a few
> holdouts. As to your other "now that" sequence, your example has "that"
> as a demonstrative, and it is clearly pronominal. I don't know of any
> grammar that identifies relative that with demonstrative that. (I also
> don't find the comma necessary, but that's another matter.) You're right,
> of course, that the "that" in these modern cases does mark a subordinate,
> non-relative clause, and, consequently, the clause will contain no nominal
> gaps, since those occur only in relatives (to avoid undue redundancy).
>
>
>
> As to your feeling that the arguments for "that" as a subordinator don't
> consider the possibility of a third "that," it's worse than that. Those
> arguments explicitly reject that possibility. On morphosyntactic grounds,
> there is no evidence that relative "that" is in any way pronominal.
>
>
>
> Your argument that "the music that moves her" and "the people who move
> her" are parallel is based solely on intuition, not on evidence.
> Intuition is, of course, a double-edged term in grammar. Within a large
> body of linguistic literature the term is carefully and narrowly defined
> to mean native speaker judgments of well-formedness of an utterance. You
> may or may not accept that definition, but it is at least reasonable
> rigorous. In your usage below, "intuition" is more like "gut feeling,"
> something on the basis of which I might choose whom to hire out of several
> otherwise equally qualified applicants, but we can't base science on gut
> feeling. We can create hypotheses in part that way, but we can't test
> them that way. That sort of intuition is not evidence.
>
>
>
> I agree, however, that the two are parallel, and they are because
> reference can be represented by a pronoun or by zero anaphora, and in
> that-relatives we have the latter. The gap occurs in just the place where
> the co-referential NP would be if it were a main clause. If I remember
> right, Halliday and Hassan dealt at some length with deletion as a
> cohesive device. In both sentences, the head noun represents what's doing
> the moving. We interpret the subject of "move" either from the pronoun
> "who," which co-indexes with "the people," or from the zero subject after
> "that." As I argued earlier, that subject is zero precisely because a lot
> of speakers can say, "The man 0 met me at the airport dropped me off at my
> office." It is partly intonation that helps us parse the utterance.
> People differ as to whether they would use this construction, but it
> represents a simple asyndetic relative clause where the zero subject
> co-indexes with the head noun.
>
>
>
> To demonstrate that relative "that" is in some way nominal, you'll need to
> show that it has clearly nominal behavior, and that's a morphosyntactic
> question, not one that can be answered from intuition.
>
>
>
> On the other hand, Edith raises the interesting question of whether "that"
> could be changing its function from subordinator to pronoun. I certainly
> don't reject that possibility. Such grammatical change is not unusual,
> and more radical cases abound. My problem with the claim, though, is
> again an absence of evidence beyond, present company excepted, naïve
> assumptions about grammar. A long time ago, 1973, I think, I published a
> paper that included an internal reconstruction of the Yoruba preverbal
> morphemes, including the subject pronouns. This is a fairly complex
> problem, and internal reconstruction is a historical linguistic
> methodology for extrapolating earlier stages of a language from synchronic
> alternations and irregularities. On historical grounds, what every
> grammar and every Yoruba teacher I had called a third person singular
> pronoun was nothing of the sort. Historically I could explain every
> phonological and morphological property of the form, and none of
>
>
>
> it had any historical source in the pronoun systems. Rather, the third
> singular in the present affirmative indicative was a zero form, just as it
> was in all the other subject pronoun sets in the language, and there were
> different paradigms depending on tense, modality, and negation. In spite
> of a total lack of morphosyntactic evidence that the form was a third
> singular subject pronoun and in the face of overwhelming evidence to the
> contrary, grammar writers, Yoruba language teachers, and speakers of the
> language who also spoke English insisted that the word did in fact
> translate as English he/she/it (the language is totally without gender
> marking). On the basis of that, I can accept that for modern speakers
> that form has changed from what it was historically, a combination of two
> different morphemes neither of them pronominal, to a subject pronoun.
>
>
>
> Edith suggests that something similar has happened in English with
> relative that, but in the English case the grammars are far from in
> agreement, and the best of them, Jespersen and Huddleston&Pullum, reject
> the idea. Grammar teachers are rather more in agreement, but I suspect
> that's because of what they've been taught, which tends not to come from
> the best sources. So the change may be in progress, but there's no way of
> detecting it yet.
>
>
>
> Herb
>
>
>
>
>
> Herb,
>
>
>
>
>
> In structures like "except that" and "now that", "that" is clearly
>
> part of a subordinating (or complementing) process. Both require an
>
> explicit subject for the clause that follows. "Now that Obama has been
>
> elected..." If we said "Now that is a good thing," "that" is clearly
>
> acting like a pronoun. I would also expect a comma after "now." "Now,
>
> that is a good thing."
>
> I can't help feeling that the arguments for "that" as a subordinator
>
> rather than a pronoun don't consider the possibility of different
>
> "that's." I'm positing three: the subordinator, the demonstrative, and
>
> the relative.)
>
> To me, "The music that moves her" is very parallel to "The people who
>
> move her." Neither that or who can be deleted from these because (as I
>
> see it) the clause needs an explicit subject. Either can be deleted if
>
> another subject is present. ("The music she loves... The people she
>
> loves.") You keep saying there isn't any evidence for "that" as a
>
> relative, but the evidence seems strong to me. The feeling sense that
>
> the music is doing the moving and "that" stands in as the clause
>
> subject seems very compelling. None of the arguments against it seem to
>
> outwiegh that compelling intuition.
>
> Is it just a matter of classifying "that" differently because it
>
> doesn't have as much flexibility as "which" ("with which") or have
>
> separate forms (like "whose" and "whom")? Can we have a relative
>
> pronoun with more constraints than other pronouns?
>
> We call these clauses "relative" in part because they are adjectival
>
> and the pronoun stands in for what the whole clause modifies. Is there
>
> an example for "that" in which that doesn't at least seem to happen? Is
>
> seeming (cognition) unimportant? Wouldn't it make just as much sense to
>
> call it a relative pronoun at least in these instances when it seems to
>
> act like one?
>
> As far as I can tell, I recognize the same observations about how it
>
> acts as you do, but am just comfortable placing it in a relative
>
> category because it seems similar enough to other relatives to warrant
>
> that.
>
> Clearly, in other cases, "that" acts like a subordinator or different
>
> kind of (non-relative) pronoun.
>
> Am I totally missing the point?
>
>
>
> Craig
>
>
>
>
>
> 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]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
>
> ________________________________________
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