Craig,

I'm surprised at your surprise.  I did not suggest that language reduces to form.  Rather there is an important part of language that is form, and this is particularly true of what we call "function words," as opposed to "content words."  Function words tend to be pretty bleached of content and rather have grammatical function.  "That" in relative clauses is such a word, and it has to be analyzed formally.  If it also has pronominal function, then I would expect to find evidence of that, and so far there is none.  If it were to develop a gender or number contrast, if, for example, we began using "these" if the head noun is plural, then there would be evidence that it's a pronoun.  It may become a pronoun, but if it does, the shift will leave structural traces.  I say that with confidence because that's how language change works.  The problem with relying on what we believe "that" to mean in a relative clause is that so far we've found no way to test that belief.  That's different from deciding that "disinterested" also means "uninsterested" or that "infer" means "imply."  For many speakers these meanings have changed, and we can see that in their usage.  We haven't seen anything comparable in the usage of "that" in relative clauses.

Herb

Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN  47306
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________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: January 21, 2009 9:19 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Pedants that or who?

Herb,
   I am deeply surprised by this. Do you mean to imply that language can be reduced to form? What a word means has nothing to do with what we believe it means? I tend to look at grammar as  form/meaning pairing, and cutting out the meaning side is highly problematic. Am I misreading you on this one?
  I try to be honest with my students as much as I can. Part of that means telling them that my views are sometimes idiosyncratic, at other times in harmony with the mainstream. If views differ or some aspect of grammar is deliberately simplified, I try to make that clear.

Craig

STAHLKE, HERBERT F wrote:
Craig,

What do we base science on if not formal observation?  That’s how it works.  Now what we choose to teach and how we choose to teach it is another matter, that’s pedagogy, as we all know, more art than science.  If it helps to call “that” a relative pronoun in teaching grammar to your writing students, then by all means do so.  But recognize at the same time that this is a useful lie, just like telling high school physics students that f=ma, or high school music student that a seventh chord has to resolve.  If they get to the point where they understand linguistic methods and how to use them, they’ll have forgiven you for simplifying earlier.

Herb

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
Sent: 2009-01-20 11:23
To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[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 th

e 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 morphologic

al 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

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