[Ads-l] weird "which"

Dan Goncharoff thegonch at GMAIL.COM
Tue Jun 23 20:04:24 UTC 2020


I still believe the carefully edited advertisement was missing a "made",
leaving only the use of "which" when "that" is the better choice.

On Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 1:49 PM Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:

> This one is harder to deal with than other wicked “witch”es because of the
> garden path—the “which” seems at first to want to be an old-fashioned
> relative pronoun (cf. “which nine out of ten women said made their hair
> appear thicker...”) until that parsing eventually self-destructs.  Other
> cases don’t yield a similar garden path, or at least not such a prolonged
> one.
>
> LH
>
> > On Jun 23, 2020, at 5:54 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> wrote:
> >
> > Weird to me, anyway, especially in a pricey, presumably carefully edited
> TV
> > commercial for a glamour hair product:
> >
> > "Including a full-size leave-in elixir which nine out of ten women said
> > their hair appeared thicker and fuller in just one week!"
> >
> > JL
> >
> > --
> > "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the
> truth."
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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