Quotative [to be] + "that"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Mar 25, 2005, at 2:19 PM, Peter A. McGraw wrote:

> As I understood Jonathan's post, the mechanism he was referring to is
> called a "cut-and-paste glitch" or a "typo."

to pick some nits: there are many kinds of typos, of which the
cut-and-paste variety is just one.  i have a small collection of the
cut-and-paste type, but none quite like this one.  (but see below.)

>  If the "all are that"
> sequence had occurred more than once in the passage, it would be less
> likely to be explainable as a typo, but if I recall the original quote
> correctly, there was only that single occurrence.
>
> The writer could easily have started with "are in agreement that,"
> decided
> that "agreed" was shorter and therefore preferable, deleted the "in
> agreement" and forgotten to follow through by typing in "agreed."  Or
> gotten distracted in the middle of typing the sentence and resumed at
> the
> wrong place.  Etc. etc.  Just now I forgot to type the "to" in "the
> mechanism he was referring to" above, then added it when I looked over
> the
> sentence--nothing grammatical about it.

ah, this last is a skip-ahead typo, and it is indeed common.  the "they
all are that..." example could have been a typo of this sort.  i see
now that the other scenarios above are possible, too.

look, i'm not insisting that this one example has to be a grammatical
innovation.  i *am* entertaining that possibility, because it resembles
examples i've seen that are very unlikely to be slips of any sort.
meanwhile, i'm strongly objecting to the view that if some production
can be seen as a slip of some sort, then it should be, and consequently
should be dismissed from further discussion.

one thing i need to stress, again,  for the hundredth or so time: the
very same production can have different statuses on different
occasions.  in particular, for some people at some times it can be an
inadvertent error, a slip of one sort or another, while for other
people or on other occasions, it can be a genuine variant form --
advertent, though divergent from many other people's varieties.

in the case at hand, it would be really nice to know what the original
writer thought about this production.  and to find out if similar
productions occur in speech (where the mechanisms that might give rise
to this particular kind of typo are probably not at work).  and to see
if this writer produces similar occurrences with some frequency.  and
to see what other people do.

consider the case of "be done one's X", as in "I'm done my homework"
'I'm done with my homework'.  if you saw one example in writing, you
might say that it was obviously a skip-ahead typo, an inadvertent
elimination of intended "with", and so deserves no attention from
students of linguistic variation.  (it would be of interest only to
(psycho)linguists and psychologists who study speech errors.)

but then it turns out that there are plenty of examples.  from speech
as well as writing.  and people who use it say that that's what they
meant to say.  so variationists/dialectologists have to take it
seriously, even if they've never noticed it before and find it flatly
ungrammatical for them.

what i'm saying about the "be that+S" example is that i know enough to
think that it might not be a slip.  provisionally, i'm taking it
seriously.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)