which we're going to get through this

[Herb Stahlke]

There are a couple of TV ads on currently featuring a working-class
guy telling his family, in one, and his son in the other, that he may
get laid off.  In the family ad he saiys something like "We may have
to postpone some promises, which we're going to get through this."
Those are not the exact words, but the use of "which" is as he uses it
in the ad.  I suspect the usage may be employed by the writers as a
marker of class, and I've heard it before in sentences like "We were
going to go on a picnic Saturday, which it rained."  I don't remember
hearing it used much by college educated speakers.  The social
contexts have been working class.

Wh-indefinite pronouns or question words started to show up as
relative pronouns in the 10th c. under the influence of Latin, but
with the demise of English as a written standard after the Norman
Conquest, the shift disappeared until English once again became a more
widely used written language in the late 13th c.  The wh-relatives
came into literate, educated English between about 1300 and 1600, with
a few changes in usage after that.  The King James Version (1611)
translates the first phrase of the Lord's Prayer as "Our father which
art in heaven," but since about the 18th c. "which" has not been used
to refer to humans.

The usage of wh-relatives does seem to be related to level of
education, and I wonder if the use of "which" as a sort of
coordinating conjunction, as above, might be a hypercorrection.
Speakers who don't have the professional class rules governing "which"
know that some people use "which" in ways in which they themselves
don't.  The "which" plus coordinate clause construction arises as an
unsuccessful attempt to emulate those rules.  Treating these sentences
in this way is a WAG.  I've searched the ADS-L archives for postings
dealing with "which," and I found the usual "that" vs. "which"
discussions, quite a few of them in fact, but none dealing with the
coordinating usage.  Does anyone know of scholarship that deals with
this construction?

Herb

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