That word "neen"

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:38 PM -0700 8/21/02, T. Hakala wrote:
>Yes, I got the jocular tone of your email.  And I was joking back about
>being hard on the Finns.  But I do find it interesting that non-native
>speakers make grammatical "mistakes" (yes, the who/that distinction
>probably bothers only language mavens) relative to their original language
>maps.

Actually, as I tried to point out in my post earlier today, it's the
other way around:  the language mavens side with the so-called Finns
here.  The prescriptive rule, followed by editors, mavens, and
computer grammar checkers, insists on "that" with restrictive
relatives, "who/which" with non-restrictives.  The latter is actually
followed by a lot of (maybe even most) people, the former by
virtually nobody except those on whom it's imposed, but this is what
it would amount to, with asterisks marking the (soi-disant) mistakes:

the child that I saw                 that child, who(m) I just saw,...
the book that I read                that book, which I just read,...
*the child who(m) I saw        *that child, that I just saw,...
*the book which I read          *that book, that I just read,...

I suspect that the imposition itself follows from the "logic" that if
you can't use "that" with non-restrictives (as in the final two
examples in the right column), you "shouldn't" be allowed to use to
use "who"/"which" with restrictives (as in the last two examples in
the left column).  The fact that no actual speakers or writers would
obey this constraint if they weren't forced to at penpoint doesn't
stop the editors or mavens.

Larry