relative "that" again

[Neal Whitman]

I found this reference useful when I was writing about relative clauses
involving adverbial nouns (e.g., 'the day (that) the music died'):

J. van der Auwera. 1985. "Relative that - a centennial dispute", Journal of
Linguistics 21.149-179.

Neal

----- Original Message -----
From: "Laurence Horn" <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 1:03 PM
Subject: Re: relative "that" again


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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: relative "that" again
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>
> At 12:37 PM -0500 2/20/09, Mark Mandel wrote:
>>On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 12:19 PM, Herb Stahlke <hfwstahlke at gmail.com>
>>wrote:
>>
>>>  Several weeks ago we had a lengthy discussion on the ATEG list
>>>  (Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar, a group within NCTE) on
>>>  whether "that" in relative clauses like
>>>
>>>  The guy that you met at the airport...
>>>
>>>  is a pronoun or simply the same subordinating conjunstion as in a
>>> content
>>>  clause
>>>
>>>  I know that you met the guy at the airport.
>>>
>>>  I argued, drawing on Jespersen, my own Language paper (1976), and a
>>>  more thorough discussion in Huddleston&Pullum, that it's simply a
>>>  subordinator, and I think the case is overwhelming, with almost no
>>>  evidence to the contrary.
>>
>>
>>Can you please give full citations for these refs? I'm not challenging
>>them,
>>I'd just like to be able to see them.
>>
> This was a hot issue that was debated back in the (antepenultimate
> decade of the) last millennium (back when I taught syntax).  One
> argument for collapsing them was that both the "relative" and the
> "complementizer" _that_ (as we used to call them; god knows what they
> are now) can delete, although the former only (in standard varieties)
> in nonsubject relatives ("The guy you met is here"/*"The guy met you
> is here").  Also, the relative "that" doesn't allow pied piping:
>
> the book to which I am referring             [or "which I am referring
> to"]
> the woman to who(m) I am referring         [or "who I am referring to"]
> *the book/woman to that I am referring   [only: "that I am referring to"]
>
> H&P may discuss all this in CGEL; I don't have a copy.  Herb (and
> Otto) may discuss these arguments too; sorry for any duplication of
> effort.
>
> LH
>
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