commas and restrictive clauses

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Aug 4, 2007, at 9:27 AM, i wrote:

>> commas around restrictive relatives occur in american as well as
>> british writing, but not with great frequency (at least in writing
>> for publication by serious writers).  most of the handbooks suggest
>> that the practice is more common in british writing than in
>> american, and that's the impression of almost every linguist who's
>> collected some data.

just a note that this punctuation is one of several things that make
life very difficult indeed for those of us who study alternations
between "who/which", "that", and zero.

arnold

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