Talk:Relative clause/Archive 1

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Hey Marksweep, thanks for the useful copyedit.  I accept most of it.  But not all.  First of all, the examples are variations of a famous nursery rhmye "This is the house that Jack built".  The rhyme says "that", not "which", so I won't let you off with changing that.  I will accept you making the point that SOME syntacticians don't accept "that" as a relative pronoun, but they are a minority, so you can't on that basis go removing "that" throughout the whole article.
:I would disagree that they are a minority. At any rate, there is agreement about the wh- series in English, but there is no agreement about the status of "that". So we shouldn't say in the first example that "that" is a relative pronoun when this is the one contentious item. Rather start with something uncontentious that everyone can agree on, then get to the issue of "that" later. (See more below.)
Next point.  I think you are wrong about "who" after a preposition.  "Whom" is not much used in colloquial English, but colloquial English seldom puts the perposition before the pronoun.  Hand on heart: would you really say "Jack is the boy with who Jenny fell in love"? I think you've been misled by what you would do when the preposition is at the end. I've expanded this into a separate paragraph, because it IS interesting.
:I don't know what the basis for that judgement is. Searching for "in who" on Google gives about as many hits as a search for "in whom" does, though this is of course unreliable because the first search also returns hits for "WHO". (This has to be done properly; see below.)
In particular, I've just done a corpus search: "of who" is not frequently enough used to rate a mention in the table.  I'm not trying to be prescriptive in this table - the point is not that nothing else can be heard or should be allowed, but that these are what are usually observed. (I take it that is what you meant by POV - you thought I was trying to be prescriptive; but everything I wrote was descriptive of normal English use, and based on descriptive grammar books, not just my own observations.)
I take it it was a slip that you added "none" to the table in the subject row.  I challenge you to produce a contact clause with the subject pronoun suppressed.
:No slip. The issue is not "subject" vs. "object". Here's a simple example: "This is the man (who) Jack believes will be king." The relative pronoun must be in subjective/nominative case, because it refers to the subject of "will". Omitting "who" is fine, but omitting "Jack" is not. So there you have an example where a relative pronoun referring to a missing subject was omitted; it's just that you can't do this when "who" is the subject of the main verb inside the relative clause.
If you disagree with anything I write, by the way, please say why here and seek a consensus; simply changing substantive content without comment is not kosher. --Doric Loon 10:29, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, I'm operating on the general principle of being bold. I don't think that any and all changes have to be discussed first before they can be implemented, and I usually pay no attention to who wrote what. This is not about you personally; it's about this article, which could have easily been misread as being prescriptivist. I realize that it was not your intention to be prescriptive, so I think we're already in agreement regarding what the article should be about. Since there remain a few things to be discussed, let's talk about them here. I've tried to organize the following discussion around your specific objections. Please add or reorganize if you think I've left out some of your points. --MarkSweep 22:28, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Never occurred to me that this was personal.  I'm cool!  --Doric Loon 22:43, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

message: The status of "that" as a relative pronoun is contentious. (Agreed?) Traditional grammars treat "that" as a relative pronoun, but not all contemporary grammars do: e.g. the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language pp. 1056–7 makes a good case for treating "that" as a subordinator instead of a relative pronoun; and the British National Corpus treats "that" as a subordinating conjunction even when it introduces relative clauses. This is not an empty terminological debate: there are important differences between "that" and "which" (e.g. you can say "in which" but not "in that", etc.). It is precisely those differences that have led some to say that "that" behaves unlike the other relative pronouns and should therefore not be grouped with them. --MarkSweep 22:28, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: "That" certainly behaves slightly differently from the other relative pronouns, but it behaves far more differently from anything else it can be compared with.  To me, the principle that language abhors a vacuum is enough to explain why, given two near synonyms we have evolved patterns of preferring one or other in particular circumstances.  But whether I agree with the latest theory is neither here nor there.  Traditional grammar certainly makes it a relative, and so do most of the books being published today.  To me, this IS a fairly empty terminological debate.  I am interested in theory and don't mind you writing it up, but I doubt if this distinction is actually helpful to anyone trying to use the language. My proposal: put a heading "Controversial status of that" at the bottom just above the overview table and discuss this there, but it would be important to name the linguist who proposed the theory and note that it is new and not universally accepted.  Then, having dealt with that there, write the rest of the article on the assumption that the traditional terminology is good enough.--Doric Loon 22:43, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Of course I meant "language abhors a synonym" - a rather corny catch-phrase, but it has a grain of truth.  --Doric Loon 10:29, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Status of ''that''

message: How do people feel about moving this page to relative clause? It's very difficult to discuss relative pronouns in isolation and the current version already touches on many of the larger phenomena related to relative clauses.  Then "relative pronoun" could simply be left as a redirect to "relative clause", or could consist of a brief overview and a boldface link to "relative clause". Issues like preposition stranding and defining vs. non-defining relative clauses in English do interact with relative pronouns, but are perhaps more appropriate in an article about relative clauses in general.  Any thoughts? --MarkSweep 19:04, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd support that 100%. I was actually just thinking earlier today that relative clause should redirect here, but your way makes more sense. Ruakh 19:25, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Go for it!--Doric Loon 21:57, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Move to [[relative clause]]?

message: So thinking about it, I don't think that this:
:There appears to be no language in the world with a distinct word used only as a relative pronoun. This suggests that relative pronouns are a fairly late development in the history of language.
(added in this revision) is correct. Hebrew is a very old language, and I can't think of any uses of asher other than as a relative pronoun. Further, while nowadays it is mostly replaced by she-, which admittedly does have other meanings (much like English that), asher and she- were completely distinct in Biblical Hebrew: as far as I can think, the former was exclusively a relative pronoun, the latter never one.
Unless some source can be given to support it, I think it should be removed, or perhaps made more narrow; maybe relative clauses were a late development in Indo-European languages, even if other languages had them as an essential part of the language? Ruakh 04:24, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: My source for that was the article Relativpronomen in the German wiki - not really authoritative enough.  I did wonder myself if it would be safer not to make a claim as absolute as "there is no language in the world". (Which is why I added the cop-out "appears to be" - but that's not good enough, is it?)  But I think the point is still worth making that these are seldom words with unique useages.  The French que goes back to a conjunction in Latin, for example.  --Doric Loon 11:12, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: que is also a conjunction in French, used in much the same way as the English conjunction that. But the mere fact of English, French, and German doing something one way is not justification for the claim that languages "seldom" do it differently; after all, these languages are closely related, and the fact that they do something similarly could reflect this shared ancestry, rather than a nearly-universal truth of human language. Ruakh 15:29, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  No language with a distinct relative pronoun?