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

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Aug 7, 2007, at 11:55 AM, Larry Horn wrote:

> 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.

as i pointed out in an earlier posting, dislike of human "that" has a
longer history than this.

> 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,

well, *a* complementizer, not necessarily the same lexical item as
the "that" of "that"-complementation.

> and so doesn't actually refer to anyone
> or anything.

i think this is exactly the right analysis, and so does CGEL.

>   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.

the earlier situation doesn't necessarily bear on the current state
of things.  reanalyis happens, after all.

but you can argue from the facts of modern standard english that
relative "that" is not in fact a pronoun, but just a mark of
subordination.  relative "which", however, is a pronoun (a definite
pronoun, specifically).

which is to say that the relativizers "that" and "which" differ in
meaning -- subtly, but in ways that show up in some interesting
contrasts between them.  some preliminary discussion in:

   http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~zwicky/whichthat.linginst.pdf

arnold

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