"I've a 24" 2.4Ghz iMac _that's_ hard drive recently packed in."

[Jonathan Lighter]

I mentioned this some years ago. I had a freshman in the early '80s who
insisted that "that's" was correct because "whose" referred to people.

When I surveyed English Department graduate students with a
fill-in-the-blank quiz, a fair number filled in the blanks with "that's"
instead of "whose."

God knows what they wrote in their own papers. They were mainly working on
masters' rather than doctoraldegrees, if that makes anyone feel better.  And
did I mention that the degrees would be in English?  Yeah, I guess I did.

JL

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 5:02 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: "I've a 24" 2.4Ghz iMac _that's_ hard drive recently
> packed
>              in."
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 4:30 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
> wrote:
>
> > it's an instance of "that" (reanalyzed from complementizer to
> > relative pronoun) in the genitive, as noted.
> >
>
> Well, that's certainly the clearest, simplest, and most obvious
> explanation. Surely, no one wishes to assert a contradictory analysis.
>
>
> I can't keep a straight face! The analysis is so obvious that I should
> have gone with my first mind and given the sentence just an [NT], of
> interest only because someone had written_that's_ instead of only
> speaking it. Failing that, my suggested "analysis" should have had a
> :-) after it.
>
> "Sorry about that," to coin a phrase.
>
> --
> -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
>
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>



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