Herb,
This is hugely helpful.
I'm not sure the human/non-human contrast is telling, since you could
easily add "that" to the list. (Is "which" a variation or an
independent form?)
For which/that, you could add a grounding/not grounding contrast,
explainable in tradiitonal grammar as restrictive/non-restrictive.
"that" is definitely definite.
Isn't "who" deletable? (Strictly speaking, I guess it's deletable in
the "whom" case. But "that" doesn't have an "objective" form, so they
seem very parallel to me in the way they follow deletion rules.)
I think you are verifying my sense that there is not one single element
that places something in the pronoun category, but a set of
characteristics that sometimes overlap. In other words, if you used any
single category to eliminate "that", you might have to eliminate
something else as well. (I'm disagreeing with your sense that "that" is
the only one deletable.)
Once we get down to this level, though, classification becomes mildly
misleading.
I think most of us are used to a definition of pronoun as something
that "stands in " for a noun or "takes the place of a noun". Since
"that" seems to us to be doing that in relative clauses, perhaps
fooling us into believing that, we want to place it in the pronoun
category on largely functional grounds.
I understand the impetus to narrow categories down to what we can
scientifically observe. Both functional and cognitive approaches would
go beyond that. As Langacher says in a number of places, it may be hard
to define what a noun is on cognitive grounds (to give one example),
but that doesn't mean it isn't enormously valuable, even essential to
try.
Even on structural grounds, relative "that" seems to act differently
from subordinate "that" by taking a clause internal position.
But thanks much for this line of thought. My understanding deepens as
we go.
Craig
Craig,
>
> Good question. I would expect a pronoun to have some of the following
> properties:
>
> Gender and/or number constrast
> (Personal pronouns have both; demonstratives have number; interrogative
> and relative pronouns have a human/non-human contrast with who/whose/whom
> vs. what/which.)
>
> Case contrast
> (Personal pronouns have three; interrogative and wh-relative also have
> three unless you don't use "whom.")
>
> Definite/indefinite contrast
> (Interrogative and wh-relative pronouns have -ever forms.)
>
> Not deletable
> (NPs may be pronominalized or deleted. Deletion is not a possibility for
> pronouns; it's an alternative reduction of NPs resulting in zero anaphora.
> This is a different topic, pronominalization vs. deletion, on which there
> is a considerable literature. If you want to go into it, I'll post
> something separate on it. Subordinator "that" is deletable. Wh-pronouns
> are not. Relative that behaves like the subordinator, not like a
> pronoun.)
>
> One of the most telling ways in which "that" fails to behave as a pronoun
> in relative clauses is that the plural form it has as a pronoun (those)
> NEVER occurs, not even in non-standard dialects, speech errors, or child
> language. If it were a pronoun, I would expect such an error to occur and
> be noticed, but it doesn't ever get mentioned even in the most arbitrary
> of prescriptive grammars. It's not even perceived as a grammar problem
> because relative "that" simply isn't a pronoun and so wouldn't ever invite
> a plural agreement form.
>
> Herb
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
> Sent: 2009-01-24 10:38
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Pedants that or who?
>
> 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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