who -> that [Was: Seeking a Polish female that ...]

[Jonathan Lighter]

"That" sounds fine to me, but FWIW, if  I _ever_ knew an undergraduate since the 1970s  who wrote "who" in this context rather than "that," they have made no impression on my memory.

  ISTR reading in a (1920s?) discussion of Scots English that relative "who" is virtually nonexistent in everyday speech north of the Tweed.  That seems certainly to be the case in East Tennessee English today.

  Michael Montgomery can enlighten us further better than I.

  JL



Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: who -> that [Was: Seeking a Polish female that ...]
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At 2:44 PM -0400 8/7/07, Wilson Gray wrote:
>What messes with my mind is that something that wasn't a problem when
>I was in an all-black elementary school in the '40's and in a 99.44%
>white high school in the the '50's, it never occurred to anyone in
>either school to teach us that "that" couldn't be used with living
>beings as well as with inanimate objects in restrictive relative
>clauses.
>
>It seems as though someone in the '80's or whenever, with nothing
>better to do, suddenly decided, out of the clear, blue sky, that he
>didn't like this use of "that" with living beings and decided to make
>up a rule saying that and to start teaching it.
>
>-Wilson

I wonder if it would help convince such folks if we were to make the
case that the "that" in such cases isn't really a relative pronoun at
all but the complementizer, and so doesn't actually refer to anyone
or anything. On this view, "the man that came in" is just "the man
who that came in" with the "who" deleted, while "the book which I
read" is from "the book which that I read" with the "which" deleted,
or suppressed, or whatever. (As I recall, the evidence for this
claim comes from earlier versions of English in which the "wh- that"
sequences were possible.)

Naaah.

LH

>.
>
>On 8/7/07, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>-----------------------
>> Sender: American Dialect Society
>> Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
>> Subject: Re: who -> that [Was: Seeking a Polish female that ...]
>>
>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>> On Aug 7, 2007, at 6:44 AM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>>
>> > Is my impression correct that there is an increasing tendency to
>> > refer to people using "that"?
>>
>> MWDEU (1989:895): It may be that some carryover from the 18th-century
>> general dislike of _that_ has produced the apparently common, yet
>> unfounded, notion that _that_ may be used to refer only to things
>> [with references to Bernstein, Simon, Safire, and others either
>> reporting or expressing this dislike]
>>
>> Garner's Modern American Usage (2003:836): _That_, of course, is
>> permissible when referring to humans... Editors tend, however, to
>> prefer [_who_]
>>
>> .....
>>
>> the observation is that _that_ has been in use for reference to
>> humans, in writing as well as speech, in formal as well as informal
>> english, for about two hundred years. (until the 18th century it was
>> apparently the norm.) now, whether _that_ is gaining on _who_ (and,
>> if so, to what degrees for which speakers/writers and in which
>> contexts) i don't know, though i'd imagine that the question has been
>> studied. i'd start by looking at the Longman grammar.
>>
>> arnold
>>
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>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>
>
>--
>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.
>-----
> -Sam'l Clemens
>
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