[Ads-l] that:who::whom:which?

[Herb Stahlke]

There's a sizeable linguistic literature on that v. wh--.  Much of it
argues, following Jespersen, that relative-that is not a pronoun at all but
is simply the same thing as the complementizer-that in a sentence like

I said that I'd be there.

Johann van der Auwera published an excellent critique of the anti-pronoun
arguments (Journal of Linguistics 1985 - Volume 21, Issue 01) that was
answered rather well in Huddleston and Pullum's CGCE.  I lean towards the
complementizer side, and if we're right, then there is no parallel between
"that" and "which" since "that" would have no pronominal traits at all.

Herb

On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 11:46 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 12:03 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
> wrote:
>
> > I would think that here, as in many other contexts, "that" is used
> > precisely to avoid the decision between "who" and "which", such as cases
> in
> > which animals are the antecedents (especially pets):  a dog
> > {that/?who/?which} had just been hit by a car...   Similarly for clones,
> > I'd expect.  It's sort of like "that" is the "they" of relative pronouns.
>
>
> Or it may simply be the case that prescriptive grammarians had ceased to be
> seriously concerned about the supposed "distinction" between _who_/which_
> and _that_ in restrictive [old style]/defining [new style] relative clauses
> by the fall of 1950.
> --
> -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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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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