relative "that" again
Herb Stahlke
hfwstahlke at GMAIL.COM
Sat Feb 21 13:38:13 UTC 2009
I would stop worrying about it, except that some fairly bright people
on the other list maintained that, in spite of the morphosyntactic
evidence, people perceived relative "that" as a pronoun. How one
would show this to be so I can't imagine, and I raised that objection.
However, I've seen at least one other case in morphosyntax where the
evidence clearly points to one analysis and popular perception,
including all of the grammars I've checked, selects another. This
case has to do with subject pronouns in Yoruba, and I won't go into
the details here. I did write the problem up in a 1974 paper,
Pronouns and islands in Yoruba, in Studies in African Linguistics
5.2:171-204. The morphosyntactic evidence is that third singular
subject pronoun is zero and that the tone and vowel that is usually
interpreted as third singular actually have other grammatical
functions that are not pronominal.
So the interesting question is whether popular perception can bring
about changes in linguistic description. We have seen something
analogous to this in partial mergers, where native speaker perception
and instrumental evidence differ, but I remain unconvinced that
popular perception in either of these grammatical cases reflects the
facts of the languages.
Herb
On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 5:10 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject: Re: relative "that" again
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> That it's unique is my point. You stop worrying about it and let
> someone else show that the analysis won't stand. The fact that
> something that *appears* to be similar was in vogue two hundred years
> ago or the fact that there's a history of one kind of string written
> as _'s_ in contemporary English that can be traced all the way back to
> one proto-Indo-European Genitive, if you want, says nothing about your
> example string. Do you know someone who actually speaks this way? I
> don't, but it seems to me that it's something that someone might very
> well say. I may even have used something similar, myself. But, is it a
> nonce formation or is there a dialect that routinely uses such strings
> as a matter of course? Another can't-no-cat-get-in-no-coop dialect?
>
> Or am I missing the point and the problem is that your counter-example
> is *possible* and not a string so totally *impossible* that no one
> could come up with it, even if he sat down and studied over it?
>
> -Wilson
> –––
> 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.
> -----
> -Mark Twain
>
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 4:14 PM, Herb Stahlke <hfwstahlke at gmail.com> wrote:
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>> Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster: Herb Stahlke <hfwstahlke at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject: Re: relative "that" again
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Some speakers do use a resumptive pronoun for the possessive in
>> relative clauses. I know there was a fashion (18th c.?) of writing a
>> possessive pronoun instead of a possessive clitic, but I don't think
>> that ever actually represented a grammatical shift. The 's clitic goes
>> back to an OE case ending rather than a possessive pronoun. But I
>> think the clitic and the resumptive pronoun work differently. We
>> don't find other instances of possessive pronouns contracting in this
>> way.
>>
>> Herb
>>
>> On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 3:39 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>>> Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>> Poster: Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
>>> Subject: Re: relative "that" again
>>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>
>>> Why not analyze
>>>
>>> The guy that's sister married your cousin ...
>>>
>>> as
>>>
>>> The guy that his sister married your cousin ...
>>>
>>> -Wilson
>>> –––
>>> 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.
>>> -----
>>> -Mark Twain
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 12:19 PM, Herb Stahlke <hfwstahlke at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>>>> Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>>> Poster: Herb Stahlke <hfwstahlke at GMAIL.COM>
>>>> Subject: relative "that" again
>>>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>
>>>> This topic is peripheral to the interests of this list, but I'm hoping
>>>> it'll catch the interest of another grammarian or two.
>>>>
>>>> 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. However, there are two troublesome kinds of
>>>> data for my claim.
>>>>
>>>> First there is the non-standard form "that's" as in
>>>>
>>>> The guy that's sister married your cousin...
>>>>
>>>> Several on the list argue that the fact that "that" takes a genitive
>>>> clitic in non-standard usage makes it a pronoun at least in those
>>>> varieties of English. This claim is weakened by the fact that
>>>> demonstrative "that" never takes genitive -'s. I raised the
>>>> possibility that relative "that" cliticizes to the head NP of the
>>>> relative clause and that the -'s then cliticizes to that noun-headed
>>>> construction, an analysis, that I admittedly have no evidence for.
>>>>
>>>> The second problem usage with relative "that" came to my attention in
>>>> a peculiar way, and I'm borrowing from my posting to the ATEG list.
>>>> Last Wednesday evening I was directing my church choir in a rehearsal
>>>> of Millard Walker's setting of Psalm 121 (Brodt Music Company 1966).
>>>> The text is the metrical version of the psalm from the Bay Psalm Book
>>>> (1640). The Bay Psalm text is
>>>>
>>>> 1 I to the hills lift up mine eyes,
>>>> from whence shall come mine aid.
>>>> 2 Mine help doth from Jehovah come,
>>>> which heav'n and earth hath made.
>>>> 3 He will not let thy foot be moved,
>>>> nor slumber; that thee keeps.
>>>> 4 Lo he that keepth Israel,
>>>> he slumbreth not, nor sleeps.
>>>> 5 The Lord thy keeper is, the Lord
>>>> on thy right hand the shade.
>>>> 6 The sun by day, nor moon by night,
>>>> shall thee by stroke invade.
>>>> 7 The Lord will keep thee from all ill:
>>>> thy soul he keeps alway,
>>>> 8 Thy going out, and thy in come
>>>> the Lord keeps now and aye.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> http://www.cgmusic.com/workshop/baypsalm_frame.htm
>>>>
>>>> It has been observed that the Puritan translators and versifiers of
>>>> the Psalter did not include poetry among their virtues, sacrificing
>>>> grammar and sometimes sense on the altar of meter and rhyme. What
>>>> struck me, though, was verse 3.
>>>>
>>>> 3 He will not let thy foot be moved,
>>>> nor slumber; that thee keeps.
>>>>
>>>> I have and still do maintain firmly that there is no grammatical
>>>> evidence to support the claim that "that" used at the beginning of a
>>>> relative clause is a pronoun and not simply a subordinating
>>>> conjunction. Combine a grammarian with a choir director, however, and
>>>> the thought interrupts maintaining the beat that this instance of
>>>> relative "that" feels very pronominal, and not just in the
>>>> impressionistic sense that others have expressed. This is the only
>>>> instance of relative "that" I have encountered where "that" must be
>>>> stressed. We rarely stress "that" as a subordinating conjunction,
>>>> whether in a relative or a content clause. Here, however, the meter,
>>>> so slavishly followed by the writers, requires us to stress "that."
>>>> It's an iambic line, and "that" bears the ictus of the second foot.
>>>> This also appears to be a case of a headless relative clause, as in
>>>> "Who laughs last laughs best," and headless relatives must begin with
>>>> pronouns, usually wh-words. Of course, if "that" is a pronoun in this
>>>> case, and it does look like one, it violates the prescriptive notion
>>>> that "that" refers only to non-humans. But then "which" in v. 2
>>>> refers to Jehovah, not a human, but still a person. Early Modern
>>>> English did allow such a use of "which" Anyone familiar with older
>>>> editions of the King James Version remember "Our Father which art in
>>>> heaven" as the opening of the Lord's Prayer.
>>>>
>>>> So there are two strong, grammatical reasons for considering this
>>>> instance of relative "that" to be a pronoun. It's stressed (the
>>>> subordinator "that" never is), and it introduces a headless relative,
>>>> which only pronouns can do. Now, is this a quirk of bad Puritan
>>>> poetry? Even if so, the construction had to feel possible or even
>>>> these violators of grammar and sense wouldn't have used it. This
>>>> instance demonstrates that there is a case in a strange bit of bad
>>>> mid-17th c. verse of relative "that" used in a way that can only be
>>>> considered a pronoun. The evidence in Late Modern English remains
>>>> overwhelming that we no longer do so, if English speakers ever
>>>> actually did.
>>>>
>>>> I admit I don't know quite what to make of the Puritan pronominal
>>>> relative "that."
>>>>
>>>> Herb
>>>>
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>>>>
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