Martha,

 

Thanks for the great historical sketch. I suspect most of us can name books or teachers whose influence still shows up in our teaching today, and the story on "that" as an expletive has a comfortably familiar ring.  As one of the louder voices in the discussion of "that", arguing that relative "that" is a subordinator and not a pronoun I can refer you to an older paper I did that makes that case.  The syntactic theory is pretty dated, but the facts still hold.  It's titled "Which that" in 1976 volume of Language, I think Number 2 or 3.  Jespersen, incidentally, also treats "as" as the same sort of thing as "thing", often occurring with "same" as in "The game came out the same as I thought it would."  There are also less common, perhaps non-Standard, uses like "The first person as told me" or "The first person as I met".  So H&H are in august company.  

 

I suspected, but was not sure, that you were making a systematic distinction between dependent and subordinate, and I don't have a problem with the term "nominalizer", except that I think it obscures the fact that the "that" of nominal clauses and the "that" of relative clauses are the same thing.  But we might not agree that that's a fact.  As to "complementizer", in X-bar grammar every S-bar is made up of a COMP node and an S node, capturing the fact that subject nominal clauses are also complements and have complementizers.  The major problem I have with this analysis is that it uses "complement" not in the sense of obligatory argument but in the sense of embedded sentence, coming out of 1960s transformational generative grammar, e.g. Rosenbaum's The Grammar of English Complementation.  I prefer to keep the term for the obligatory argument usage, allowing us to distinguish neatly between complements and modifiers, a contrast that students find useful and grasp pretty easily.

 

H&H are right about the history of "that", but diachronic arguments don't carry us very far in synchronic analysis; they're something of an extension of the etymological fallacy.  They frequently offer insight, but they don't describe synchronic behavior.

 

I discovered R&K's 1895 book a few years ago and was struck by how contemporary it sounded in many ways.  Their assessment of student learning problems and of pedagogical techniques wouldn't sound remarkable in modern publications.

 

Herb



	-----Original Message----- 

	From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Martha Kolln 

	Sent: Fri 3/5/2004 9:29 PM 

	To: [log in to unmask] 

	Cc: 

	Subject: Re: RK diagrams, that, etc.

	

	

	Dear Herb and others,



	It turns out that I'm the R&K spokesperson (or culprit, depending on your orientation), so I should answer the questions that have been raised about the diagrams and terminology in my book.



	A bit of history:  I first encountered R&K diagrams back in my school days--in the 1940s (yes, way back then!).  I saw them again in college, in the 1960s (I was an old undergraduate!) when I took a grammar course at Penn State.  And it was that grammar course that I was subsequently hired to teach.  The textbooks I had studied (and that for ten years I used in my own classes) were a traditional book by House & Harmon, Descriptive English Grammar (Prentice Hall, 1950) and a structural/transformational book by Stageberg., which featured sentence patterns.



	 What I did in my classes was to combine those two:  The sentence patterns and the diagrams.  When I got too frustrated with the two books, I wrote my own.  (Here's an example of my frustration:  H&H called "by his name" adverbial in the following sentence:  "He came by his name in a  unusual manner."  The idea of phrasal verbs was simply unknown.  To say nothing of determiners.)  And that combination, of diagrams and the structural sentence patterns, is what "Understanding English Grammar" has emphasized ever  since the first edition in 1982.  I've always felt that diagrams helped many students understand structure.  When I started, there were no books, other than Warriner's (for 7-12), that mentioned traditional diagramming.



	Now, to answer Herb's question about my labeling of "that" (the introducer of nominal clauses) as an expletive.  It's simple.  That's what House & Harmon call it.  Actually, they call it an "expletive (or introductory) conjunction."  They go on to say:  "That in its expletive function resembles the relative pronoun (from which it probably had its origin) in sentences such as 'We know that he speaks the truth.'  Doubtless that was originally a stressed demonstrative, and the clause 'he speaks the truth' was in apposition with that, as in 'I know that (He speaks the truth).' " etc. etc.  [I know now, of course--after a long exchange on this listserv--that there are those who treat "that" in relative clauses as something other than a relative pronoun.  I'm still trying my best to get it!  I'll be happy for further enlightenment on that issue.  It hasn't yet sunk in.]



	At any rate, my H&H history is the reason I call "that" an expletive.



	I should mention also that H&H  include as and or in the "expletive conjunction" category:

	        

	        As a singer, he had few equals.

	        The period, or dot, should be used here.



	As to my diagram, with that connection by a dotted line to the nominal clause--that's the original R&K diagram (as described in R&K, Higher Lessons in English, 1896).  I think it's also important to emphasize that in their book R&K presented diagrams in a very subdued, peripheral way.  I think it's a mistake to assume that Reed & Kellogg were out to promote diagramming.  The opposite is true.  Here is what they say: 



	"The Use of the Diagram.--In written analysis, the simple map, or diagram, found in the following lessons, will enable the pupil to present directly and vividly to the eye the exact function of every clause in the sentence, of every phrase in the clause,, and of every word in the phrase--to picture the complete analysis of the sentence, with principal and subordinate parts in their proper relations. . . .



	"But, if for any reason the teacher prefers not to use these diagrams, they may be omitted without causing the slightest break in the work.  The plan of this book is in no way dependent on the use of the diagrams.



	"The Objections to the Diagram.--the fact that the pictorial diagram groups the parts of the sentence according to their offices and relations, and not in the order of speech, has been spoken of as a fault.  It is, on the contrary, a merit, for it teaches the pupil to look through the literary order and discover the logical order.  He thus learns what the literary order really is, and sees that this may be varied indefinitely, so long as the logical relations are kept clear.

	. . . . .

	". . .diagrams should be used only for the more difficult sentences, or, if the sentences are long, only for the more difficult parts of them.  In both oral and written analysis there is danger of repeating what needs no repetition.  When the diagram has served its purpose, it should be dropped."





	However, I do suspect that "oral and written analysis" was somewhat different in the classrooms of 1896 than in those of today!   And, believe me, the diagrams in R&K are hardly noticeable.  I suspect that Alonzo (Reed) and Brainerd (Kellogg) [Yes, we're on a first-name basis!] would be shocked! shocked! to learn that there are now states in the U.S. of A. that are requiring R & K diagrams in their state standards!   I, too, find it shocking--and discomfiting.





	Back to "that" for a moment. The nominal clause introducer, which I am labeling an expletive, has also been called a "complementizer."  That label will work for clauses that are direct objects, perhaps, but not for those that are subjects.  Another label, "nominalizer," works for both.  I have no problem with that one.



	I do, however, reject "subordinator" because I reserve that word for the introducers of  clauses introduced by subordinating conjunctions (when, since, if, because, after, although, etc.)--i.e,, those clauses we think of as either adverbial or sentence modifiers.  In fact, I reserve the term "subordinate clause" for those adverbial/sentence modifier clauses introduced by subordinating conjunctions.  I call nominal and adjectival clauses "dependent" rather than 'subordinate."



	I suspect this is one of those places where variations in terminology are bound to exist.



	My apologies for such a long posting.



	Martha























		I'm preparing materials for an undergrad grammar course this summer, and

		I'd like to use RK diagrams for at least some of it.  Does anyone know

		of software that will easily produce RK diagrams?  I've tried various

		combinations of drawing functions and text boxes, in both Word and

		Excel, and I haven't found anything that works very well.  The obvious

		problems are combining lines with text and putting text on diagonal

		lines.  The necessary functions just don't work well together for this.

		

		Picking up on our months old discussion of the grammatical status of

		"that", I've also been looking at Kolln and Funk's Understanding English

		Grammar (6th), and I can see how RK diagrams virtually force one to

		treat "that" as a NP in relative clauses, all syntactic, morphological,

		and phonological arguments to the contrary.  I wonder, though, why they

		call "that" introducing a nominal clause an "expletive" rather than a

		subordinating conjunction, unless they require that subordinating

		conjunctions represent some major grammatical category like NP, PP,

		AdjP, or AdvP.  Although I suppose a relative clause with "that" could

		be represented like an asyndetic relative, with the dotted line

		connecting to "X" in some grammatical relation and "that" above the verb

		of the relative clause connected also by a dotted line.  And why are

		there no RK diagrams in Chapter 8, on Sentence Modifiers?  The reason

		given is that RK provides no way to do this, but this strikes me as an

		excellent opportunity to create one, an option grammarians have, since

		there appears to be no widely accepted authority on diagrammaing.

		

		Herb

		

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