the relative pronoun "whose"?

[Casiopea]

RE: "much easier to understand"

Dihen, is Chinese your L1, your first language? If so, there's a paper you may be interested in reading on the topic of resumptive pronouns:

The boy who Mary loves him is called John: A study of the resumptive pronoun problem and its correction strategies by Alice Y.W. Chan
http://ec.hku.hk/hkjal/vol9number1.htm

... Cantonese speakers of English adopt resumptive pronouns as a processing strategy to maintain the logical structure of a clause.

Also, check out this site: http://ling.wisc.edu/~yafei/courses/309_02/week8.html
Scroll down to Resumptive. It gives a brief explanation on how and why such pronouns are used by native speaker.

Lastly, have a gander here: http://polyhymnia.livejournal.com/ta...ptive+pronouns
Examples of resumptive pronouns in spoken and written English by native speakers.

All the best.

[dihen]

"the child that his mother is a teacher"
"the book that some of its pages are missing"
"the boy that I visited her sister"

Why did "MrPedantic" say that natives had never said those? Is that really true? And neither you, "Casiopea" nor "tdol" has ever answered me this question, why? Please do so.

[MrPedantic]

<Why did "MrPedantic" say that natives had never said those?>

Hello Dihen

I'm afraid I've never heard a native speaker use any of those sentences; the structures sound very strange to me.

If I found any of them in a document, I would change them without a moment's hesitation!

See you,
MrP

[dihen]

But I have heard that children that haven't gone to school yet may often make mistakes of adding resumptive pronouns with certain structures such as this one, "whose", is this true?

[Casiopea]

Dihen,

It is widely acknowledged that English pronouns can be used as a marker of the position relative to which a wh expression has to be construed (i.e. as marking the "gap", hence "resumptive"), but that such constructions are "substandard" or "marginal" (cf. Chomsky 1977, 1982; Sells 1984; Engdahl 1985, Safor 1986; Sholnsky 1992; Erteschik-Shir 1992):

(10) She got a couch at Sears that (it) was on sale.
(11) He's a professor that nobody likes (him).
(12) ... who I was going to have lunch with (him) ...
(13) ... Newton, Mass., where it's been pretty cold (there)
(14) This is the person that I told (her) about quitting ...

There is a limited marginal use of resumptive pronouns in English as a way of circumventing island contraints. The pronoun is a 'last resort' option to prevent the surfacing of an illicit trace in possessive position (Ross 1967, Chomsky 1977, Shlonsky 1992)

Read more here

About acceptability judgements:

a. ??Frank had an operation on Friday which we just found out about it.

The relative clause sounds odd (??) because a pronoun appears in a position where English requires a gap or empty category.

b. ?People are coming out with symptoms that the doctors don't know what they are.

The relative clause sounds odd but is more acceptable (?) because the grammar of English does not permit a gap in the position of the pronoun.

Whether these cases should be allowed by the grammar or classed as ungrammatical is not clear.

We found in our study that about 1% of relative clauses in spontaneous natural discourse contained resumptive pronouns.

Read more here

[Casiopea]

Originally Posted by MrPedantic

If I found any of them in a document, I would change them without a moment's hesitation!

Agreed, Mr P.

[MrPedantic]

Originally Posted by dihen

But I have heard that children that haven't gone to school yet may often make mistakes of adding resumptive pronouns with certain structures such as this one, "whose", is this true?

Sorry, Dihen! I recognize the structure now that Cas has explained it, from web-English; but I don't hear it from native speakers in my region. Maybe it's less common in British English. (After all, we have plenty of strange structures of our own to keep us busy.)

MrP

[dihen]

I have always made many mistakes with relative pronouns because I always misinterpreted them

as conjunctions. I have always interpreted them like these below. And for "who" and "whom",

I simply think of them as "having agreement on the conjunction". And for the rule of not

ending sentences with a preposition, I had never known that before. Once I know about it, I

thought "Why should the prepostion move onto the conjunction?".
`
look at these:
`
"the book-[that]-I read"
"the children-[who]-came"
"It is this book-[that]-I read yesterday."
"It was John-[who]-went to the park yesterday."
"the boy-[that]-I gave the book to"
"the boy-(to) [whom]-I gave the book (trace)"

[Casiopea]

"that" has three functions:
i. it's a demonstrative pronoun; e.g., that book over there
ii. it's a relative pronoun; e.g., the book that was on the table
iii. it's a conjunction; e.g.,

[1] the book (that) I read
[3] It is this book (that) I read yesterday.
[5] the boy (that) I gave the book to

As a conjunction, "that" doesn't play a major role in the sentence structure (i.e., subject, object), and for that reason it's often omitted (...). "I", not "that", functions as the subject in [1], [3], and [5] above. "that" doesn't play a major role. Below, "who" and "whom" play a major role,

[2] the children who came ... <subject of "came">
[6] the boy to whom I gave the book <object of "to">

"who" and "whom" are required by the structure. "who" refers to the noun "the children", and "whom" refers to the noun "the boy". The conjunction "that" doesn't refer to a noun; it's a conjunction, a joiner.

Note that, with expletive "It" constructs, as in [4a] below, "who" sounds a tad bit awkward for some speakers because the grammatical subject "John" is referenced by two opposing pronouns: "It" (non-person) and "Who" (person):

[4a] ?It was John who went to the park yesterday.

For some speakers, generic relative "that" solves the problem:

[4b] It was John that went to the park. <"that" functions as a subject, not as a conjunction>

All the best,

[dihen]

Originally Posted by Casiopea

Note that, with expletive "It" constructs, as in [4a] below, "who" sounds a tad bit awkward for some speakers because the grammatical subject "John" is referenced by two opposing pronouns: "It" (non-person) and "Who" (person):
`
[4a] ?It was John who went to the park yesterday.
`
For some speakers, generic relative "that" solves the problem:
`
[4b] It was John that went to the park. <"that" functions as a subject, not as a conjunction>

Why does "who" refer to "It"? Doesn't "who" refer to "John"? And if the subject is plural, doesn't the verb in the relative cause agree with the plural subject as in "It is John and Mary who are going to the park today."?