[Ads-l] that:who::whom:which?

[Laurence Horn]

> On Apr 18, 2016, at 5:30 PM, Herb Stahlke <hfwstahlke at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> There's a sizeable linguistic literature on that v. wh--.  Much of it
> argues, following Jespersen, that relative-that is not a pronoun at all but
> is simply the same thing as the complementizer-that in a sentence like
> 
> I said that I'd be there.
> 
> Johann van der Auwera published an excellent critique of the anti-pronoun
> arguments (Journal of Linguistics 1985 - Volume 21, Issue 01) that was
> answered rather well in Huddleston and Pullum's CGCE.  I lean towards the
> complementizer side, and if we're right, then there is no parallel between
> "that" and "which" since "that" would have no pronominal traits at all.
> 
> Herb
> 

Yeah, that was what I taught when I was teaching syntax back in the last century (it makes for a nice problem set), but I thought there was counterevidence in favor of a reanalysis-as-relative-pronoun, probably in the references Herb cites.  I forget who's on whose side in the debate.  The complementizer analysis predicts not only the lack of pied piping and the lack of animacy indicators (and case, of course) but also the absence of "thats" alongside "whose", except that as we know a lot of speakers do get "thats" (the book thats cover is torn).  

LH

> On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 11:46 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 12:03 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
>> wrote:
>> 
>>> I would think that here, as in many other contexts, "that" is used
>>> precisely to avoid the decision between "who" and "which", such as cases
>> in
>>> which animals are the antecedents (especially pets):  a dog
>>> {that/?who/?which} had just been hit by a car...   Similarly for clones,
>>> I'd expect.  It's sort of like "that" is the "they" of relative pronouns.
>> 
>> 
>> Or it may simply be the case that prescriptive grammarians had ceased to be
>> seriously concerned about the supposed "distinction" between _who_/which_
>> and _that_ in restrictive [old style]/defining [new style] relative clauses
>> by the fall of 1950.
>> --
>> -Wilson
>> -----
>> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
>> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
>> -Mark Twain
>> 
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> 
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