But if that can be either a relative pronoun or a relative adverb in relative clauses, why is there never any ambiguity as to its pronominal or adverbial status? It might be simpler to swallow the generative pill and say that the relative pronoun or relative adverb gets silenced in relative clauses introduced by that.
1. I'd like to know if the red part literally means 'to take a small flat round piece of medicine of "generative grammar" into your stomach through your mouth and throat'.
2. I'd like to know what the blue part literally means.
Lord of Goldfish, hear my prayer.
I did not mean "swallow the generative pill" literally. I didn't realize you were still following that thread of yours, and understood myself to be communicating primarily with Piscean/5jj and with other members or readers interested in the tricky question, controversial in some circles, of whether
that has the lexico-syntactic status of a relative pronoun in relative clauses beginning with
that (or
that-relatives for short).
I was implicitly utilizing the idiom "
a bitter pill to swallow" in saying "swallow the generative pill." Mainstream generative grammar maintains something that is unpleasant and difficult to accept for many grammar people, namely, that when
that appears to be functioning as a relative pronoun (as it appears to function in noun phrases like
the dog that ate the bone), it is actually not a relative pronoun at all but, rather, a complementizer/subordinator.
In other words, when
that appears to be functioning as
which or
who(m) would function in a relative clause, generative grammar maintains that it is really functioning no differently than it does in the sentence
Sally said that she was happy. It should be no surprise that that "pill" (idea) is "hard to swallow" (not easy to accept, or outright repugnant-seeming) to anyone accustomed to viewing
that in
that-relatives as a relative pronoun.
Although I have gone to some lengths in that thread to provide the generative-grammar view of
that in
that-relatives with plausibility, I am partly arguing against the part of me who resists that very view, which, however, is one that is maintained by linguists outside cyber-grammaria (PaulMatthews excepted) whom I respect very highly. I do not know PaulMatthews's precise take on
that-relatives, but I will reiterate in brief what my own understanding is.
In
that-relatives, as I understand them, where there would be a relative pronoun like
which or
who(m) were it not for the presence of
that, there is in fact such a relative pronoun in "deep structure." The relative pronoun moves from its position within the relative clause (be it as the subject of the verb, the direct object of a verb, or the object of a preposition) to a position (Specifier position) located one step above the complementizer head of the relative clause.
When the complementizer (
that) is expressed, the relative pronoun "gets silenced." That is one way of putting it. We could say, alternatively, that it is "unpronounced." Some might say that it is "elided"; however, I do not think that ellipsis can be argued to be involved, strictly speaking. The idea is that the relative pronoun is there, in underlying structure, even if you don't hear it or see it.
That does not become a relative pronoun; rather, it enables the relative pronoun not to be voiced.