hanging whiches revisited (thanks to DARE, via Joan)

[Herb Stahlke]

I haven't seen much on the Keenan-Comrie Accessibility Hierarchy, one form
of which goes

subject > direct object > object of a preposition > possessive > object of
a comparative particle

English allows wh-relatives down to OCP, as in

The speed of light, which nothing can go faster than, slows down on an LA
freeway.

Beyond the hierarchy we seem to get into island constraints, which work
only with resumptive pronouns:

The woman who I know the guy who married *0/her lives in Indy.

But in non-formal registers and non-Standard varieties, resumptives show up
especially in that-relatives.

That's the book that I read 0/?it last week.


On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 12:09 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      hanging whiches revisited (thanks to DARE, via Joan)
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Silly and neglectful me.  Thanks to a kind message from Joan Houston Hall,
> I realize that I should of course have checked DARE, where I'd have found
> (at http://www.daredictionary.com/view/dare/ID_00062407) examples going
> back to the mid-19th c. of what I'm thinking of as "hanging whiches",
> a.k.a. "which" as a conjunction (which I unsuccessfully tried in the OED),
> , including cases featuring resumptive pronouns.  Most of the cites are
> Southern or Appalachian, so maybe it's just been spreading regionally.
>  (Still more often, as JL noted earlier, to pop up in Tennessee than NYC,
> which the latter is now less unlikely than it used to be even if most folks
> disapprove of "which"-hangin in these parts.)
>
> LH
> ==============
> some "hanging whiches"
>
> 1845 Hooper Advent. Simon Suggs 147 AL, I rolled up my shirt sleeves—which
> it was a tolluble warm day and my koat was off—and ses I, you see that hoss
> yonder?
> 1851 Burke Polly Peablossom 100 GA, You know how I fit for you, in that
> last run you had ’long er Jim Smith, what like to a beat you for sheriff,
> which he would a done it, if it hadn’t been for yer Uncle Josey’s influence.
> 1897 Lewis Wolfville 29 AZ, So the girl . . , which her name is Susan,
> puts on her shaker an’ goes stampedin’ off.
> 1975 Foxfire 3 38 nGA, This one time I was gonna lay down there and wait
> till daylight ’cause I was going over in a pretty rough place (which I
> didn’t care for the rough woods nor nothing).
> 1976 Wolfram–Christian Appalachian Speech 121, I remember the doctor
> comin’ and deliverin’ the baby which we were in the other room.
> 2001 DARE File nwTX, Singin’ exactly like on the radio, which it sucks.
> 2001 DARE File NM, When I lived over on A street last winter which I can
> see the house from here.
>
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