Phaedrus
Banned
- Joined
- Jul 19, 2012
- Member Type
- English Teacher
- Native Language
- English
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- United States
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Re: Nothing is nothing more that I can ask for.
That is the cupboard which I put the glass in.
That is the cupboard that I put the glass in.
That is the cupboard in which I put the glass.
*[strike]That is the cupboard in that I put the glass[/strike].
The second is a historical argument. It used to be that that could co-occur with wh-forms in relative clauses and embedded questions. In the King James Bible, we can see that co-occurring with wh-forms in embedded questions (". . . for she had heard in the country of Moab how that the Lord had visited his people in giving them bread" [Ruth 1:6]) and with what traditional grammar calls subordinating conjunctions (". . . in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because that Abraham obeyed my voice, and kept my charge, my commandments, my statues, and my laws" [Gen. 26: 5]). For examples from earlier English, I draw from Elisabeth Traugott:
I know of two arguments to support the idea that the word that in relative clauses introduced by that is not a relative pronoun. The first is a point I made in Post #15: Pied Piping (i.e., the fronting of a preposition and the relative pronoun functioning as its complement in a relative clause in which the relativized element is the object of a preposition) does not work with that. Pied Piping alternates with Preposition Stranding.That's one assertion without anything to support it.
That is the cupboard which I put the glass in.
That is the cupboard that I put the glass in.
That is the cupboard in which I put the glass.
*[strike]That is the cupboard in that I put the glass[/strike].
The second is a historical argument. It used to be that that could co-occur with wh-forms in relative clauses and embedded questions. In the King James Bible, we can see that co-occurring with wh-forms in embedded questions (". . . for she had heard in the country of Moab how that the Lord had visited his people in giving them bread" [Ruth 1:6]) and with what traditional grammar calls subordinating conjunctions (". . . in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because that Abraham obeyed my voice, and kept my charge, my commandments, my statues, and my laws" [Gen. 26: 5]). For examples from earlier English, I draw from Elisabeth Traugott:
"All three relatives occur in ME with the subordinate that. In fact, whom that, whose that are commoner than whom, whose in the early part of the period when the wh-forms first come into use, presumably because the wh-forms were not felt to be full-fledged subordinators:
4.118 PL V.231.25 (1475?) he hathe seyd that he woold lyfte them whom that hym plese ('whom it may please him to raise').
. . . Wh- that relative forms no longer occur in Shakespearean English although only two centuries earlier they had still been very common, especially which that, as in:
4.119 Ch. Mel. B.2157 bigat upon his wyf, that called was Prudence, a doghter which that called was Sophie.
- Traugott, Elisabeth Closs. The History of English Syntax: A Transformational Approach to the History of English Sentence Structure. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.: New York, 1972.
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