a font that no one knows why it exists

[Laurence Horn]

On Mar 30, 2014, at 12:15 PM, David Bowie wrote:

> Well, I'd like to raise a dissenting voice by saying that this is an
> entirely normal construction for me, and I'm having a *lot* of trouble
> trying to figure out what all y'all's problem with it is. (In fact,
> someone said their problem is the 'it', and that *really* flummoxes me—I
> mean, I know I speak English, so what language are y'all translating
> this into in your heads?)
>
> David Bowie

People who worry about relative clauses for a living distinguish between two "strategies" for forming them, one involving gaps ("the woman that I was talking to") and the other involving resumptive pronouns instead ("the woman that I was talking to her").  In some languages, the second strategy is considered standard and may be the only one available in syntactic contexts for which the gap strategy is used in ("standard") English.  Sometimes esp. in colloquial speech we can use either strategies in English, and there's a register difference:

"the woman whose brother I work with" (gap strategy, "standard")
"the woman that I work with her brother" (resumptive pronoun strategy, "nonstandard" but frequent in colloquial English)

In the cases involving what Ross described as islands (as mentioned in Geoff Nathan's post), the gap strategy is impossible or degraded (as below) and only the resumptive pronoun strategy is possible (ignoring the paraphrases in which the relative clause is avoided, of course), but those who find such structures deviant will be at a loss:

*the font that I don't even know why exists
?the font that I don't even know why it exists

In other languages, structures parallel to the latter are impeccable, and they certainly occur in English, esp. in these faute de mieux cases, but some speakers (and virtually all "authorities") find them a bit marked.

LH
>
> From:    Randy Alexander<strangeguitars at GMAIL.COM>
>> I don't think there are any people that this is a normal construction for.
>>  I've heard it (and produced it) often enough though through strolling down
>> the garden path. I remember in college when I first became aware of it -- I
>> was excited to have found an example where English just broke down.
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Mar 29, 2014 at 8:45 PM, Benjamin Barrett<gogaku at ix.netcom.com>wrote:
>> Poster: Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM> On Mar 29, 2014, at
>> 5:29 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
>
>>>> On Sat, Mar 29, 2014 at 7:55 PM, Laurence Horn<laurence.horn at yale.edu
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> But it's not exactly English.
>>>> a font for whose existence there is no known reason.
>>> I was playing around with devising something like that, but I don't really
>>> find this to be English, either, in the sense that it doesn't seem parsable
>>> without tearing it apart bit by bit. Is this a normal construction for some
>>> people?
>
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org