relative "that" again

[Alice Faber]

Herb Stahlke wrote:
> I would stop worrying about it, except that some fairly bright people
> on the other list maintained that, in spite of the morphosyntactic
> evidence, people perceived relative "that" as a pronoun.  How one
> would show this to be so I can't imagine, and I raised that objection.
>  However, I've seen at least one other case in morphosyntax where the
> evidence clearly points to one analysis and popular perception,
> including all of the grammars I've checked, selects another.  This
> case has to do with subject pronouns in Yoruba, and I won't go into
> the details here.  I did write the problem up in a 1974 paper,
> Pronouns and islands in Yoruba, in Studies in African Linguistics
> 5.2:171-204.  The morphosyntactic evidence is that third singular
> subject pronoun is zero and that the tone and vowel that is usually
> interpreted as third singular actually have other grammatical
> functions that are not pronominal.
>
> So the interesting question is whether popular perception can bring
> about changes in linguistic description.  We have seen something
> analogous to this in partial mergers, where native speaker perception
> and instrumental evidence differ, but I remain unconvinced that
> popular perception in either of these grammatical cases reflects the
> facts of the languages.

I think you've got two different meanings of "perception" going here.
When we talk about the perception component of near mergers and the like
we're using a technical term (or at least a term of art) from cognitive
psychology, and we mean by it something relatively precise about how
human beings acquire information about the world around them. The second
meaning, implicit in your description of what's going on with "that" is
more meta-linguistic and has to do with speakers' beliefs about how and
why they say what they say. These are different.

I'm off now on a jaunt. If the discussion is ongoing when I get home
this evening, I will attempt to amplify this.
--
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Alice Faber                                       faber at haskins.yale.edu
Haskins Laboratories                            tel: (203) 865-6163 x258
New Haven, CT 06511 USA                               fax (203) 865-8963

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