relative "that" again

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:37 PM -0500 2/20/09, Mark Mandel wrote:
>On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 12:19 PM, Herb Stahlke <hfwstahlke at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>  Several weeks ago we had a lengthy discussion on the ATEG list
>>  (Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar, a group within NCTE) on
>>  whether "that" in relative clauses like
>>
>>  The guy that you met at the airport...
>>
>>  is a pronoun or simply the same subordinating conjunstion as in a content
>>  clause
>>
>>  I know that you met the guy at the airport.
>>
>>  I argued, drawing on Jespersen, my own Language paper (1976), and a
>>  more thorough discussion in Huddleston&Pullum, that it's simply a
>>  subordinator, and I think the case is overwhelming, with almost no
>>  evidence to the contrary.
>
>
>Can you please give full citations for these refs? I'm not challenging them,
>I'd just like to be able to see them.
>
This was a hot issue that was debated back in the (antepenultimate
decade of the) last millennium (back when I taught syntax).  One
argument for collapsing them was that both the "relative" and the
"complementizer" _that_ (as we used to call them; god knows what they
are now) can delete, although the former only (in standard varieties)
in nonsubject relatives ("The guy you met is here"/*"The guy met you
is here").  Also, the relative "that" doesn't allow pied piping:

the book to which I am referring             [or "which I am referring to"]
the woman to who(m) I am referring         [or "who I am referring to"]
*the book/woman to that I am referring   [only: "that I am referring to"]

H&P may discuss all this in CGEL; I don't have a copy.  Herb (and
Otto) may discuss these arguments too; sorry for any duplication of
effort.

LH

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