That/Which

[Mai Kuha]

On Fri, 28 Jul 2000, Thomas Paikeday wrote:

> Here's a question that's beginning to bother me, though not as a normal linguistic phenomenon:
>
> Why do writers drop "that/which" when the use of at least "that" would make the meaning clearer? The current tendency seems to be to modify the AP sentence thus:
>
> "He said [note dropped "on"] Monday [drop "that"] the part of the army that [changed from "which"] suffered severe casualties needs reinforcement." Or, to use the classical example, "This is the house Jack built."

In his talk "Information structure and relative clause reduction" at the
2000 AAAL meeting, Peter Master gave a good data-based account of when
this happens in relative clauses. I've been thinking of e-mailing him to
request a copy of the paper, but, in case anyone would like to beat me to
it, the address is pmaster at sjsu.edu.

-Mai
_____________________________________________
Mai Kuha                  mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu
Department of English     (765) 285-8410
Ball State University