How to interprete "which it wll be"

[Fujibei]

President Trump tweeted as follows the other day.

“If the wall is not built, which it will be, the drug situationwill NEVER be fixed the way it should be!”

What does he mean by saying "which it will be?"
What do "which" and "it" connote?

 

[Sue01]

Hi,

'Which it will be' is President Trump giving an assurance that the wall will, one day, be built. 'Which' and 'it' refer to the building of the wall.

Sue

 

[Fujibei]

Thanks for the reply.
If "which" and "it" refer to the building the wall, "which will be" be enough and "it" is redundant, isn't it?

 

[Rover_KE]

No.

 

[andrewg927]

It's never easy to try using grammar rules to explain Trump's tweets but in this case, you need both "which" and "it." The whole phrase "which it" refers to the building of the wall.

 

[Phaedrus]

“If the wall is not built, which it will be, the drug situationwill NEVER be fixed the way it should be!”

Am I the only one bothered by the fact that there is negation in the "if"-clause but not in the "which"-clause?
Such relative clauses are pretty rare, but in my experience they generally "echo" the clause with the antecedent.
I would have a much easier time with the following sentence (grammatically):

If the wall is built, which it will be, we will live happily ever after.

Fujibei, if you receive a similar response elsewhere, which you might, it won't have been plagiarized. I'm just warming up.

 

[SoothingDave]

You really need to think of how he would be speaking. The "which is will be" is really a parenthetical comment. He interrupts his own sentence in order to convey that the situation that he is describing is counter to fact. Or fact as he is promising in the future.

"If the wall is not built, bad things will continue. But we will build the wall." That's what he is saying.

 

[PaulMatthews]

President Trump tweeted as follows the other day.

“If the wall is not built, which it will be, the drug situation will NEVER be fixed the way it should be!”

What does he mean by saying "which it will be?"
What do "which" and "it" connote?

If the wall is never built, which it will be ...

It is indeed an odd way of saying things, but it can still be analysed grammatically provided one uses a dollop of common sense.

The relative clause is of the supplementary (non-restrictive) kind, so the range of antecedents allowed is much wider than with integrated (restrictive) relatives, where the antecedent is a noun or nominal.

In this case, "built" is the logical antecedent to "which", which is functioning as complement of "be". "It" is of course anaphoric to "the wall".

The relative clause means "the wall will be built".

 

[tzfujimino]

May I ask a question here?

Is it grammatically possible for a past participle to be an antecedent to a relative pronoun?

 

[PaulMatthews]

May I ask a question here?

Is it grammatically possible for a past participle to be an antecedent to a relative pronoun?

Yes: as I said, supplementary relatives (unlike integrated ones) can have virtually any element as antecedent including verb phrases.

 

[Phaedrus]

Yes: as I said, supplementary relatives (unlike integrated ones) can have virtually any element as antecedent including verb phrases.

Coincidentally, I came upon a supplementary relative clause with a verb-phrase antecedent today in Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre. It's in the first sentence of Chapter 20:

I had forgotten to draw my curtain, which I usually did, and also to let down my window-blind.

-- Charlotte Brontë

The antecedent of which is the verb phrase draw my curtain.

P.S. Regarding Trump's Tweet, I continue to have issues with the interaction between the negation in the clause of the VP antecedent and the supplementary relative clause. I have checked all my major grammar books (Quirk et al. 1985, Huddleston and Pullum 2002, Curme 1931, Sweet 1898, Poutsma 1916) and cannot find a single example in which negation is used in the clause containing the antecedent of such a supplementary relative clause. I take this as a sign that I might be right that it's "bad." However, no one seems to actually say that it is. At a different site where Fujibei also asked this question, someone has (for better or worse) linked to the following paper -- which is not for learners:

http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~thiersch/RelCl/borsley_4178997.pdf

I haven't had time yet to read the paper. But on page 645 (page 18 of the pdf) there is a footnote with the following example:

(i) John was sent to Manchester, which I have never been.

There we have negation in the supplementary relative, but not in the clause with the past-participle VP antecedent. I wonder what my fellow native speakers here think of the following variation, which flip-flops, Trump-style, the negation scenario.

(i-a) ? John was not sent to Manchester, which I have been.

 

[andrewg927]

(i-a) ? John was not sent to Manchester, which I have been.

I find that structure awkward. Besides, I don't think the structure you provided is that similar to Trump's tweet. His tweet is "If the wall is not built, which it will be." Here the main and only subject is the building of the wall while your sentence involves two different people and they are only loosely related by the location.

 

[Phaedrus]

I don't think the structure you provided is that similar to Trump's tweet.

It has the similarity I'm interested in: the participial verb phrase to which "which" refers contains negation.

 

[Phaedrus]

However, somebody else's common-sense interpretation could be: I had forgotten to draw my curtain. I usually forgot to draw my curtain.

Good point, Piscean. I, too, was struck by the ambiguity of the sentence, or the ambiguity that it would have in a contextual vacuum (by chapter 20, there is no reason for readers to assume that Jane is forgetful). I'd like to think that, if Brontë had intended that meaning, she would have instead written: "I had forgotten to draw my curtain, as usual [. . .]." Is that ambiguous, too? Maybe it should be: "I had forgotten, as usual, to draw my curtain."

 

[Phaedrus]

If that's supposed to apply to my problem with Trump's Tweet, I'd just like to say that there I'm not concerned with ambiguity. Rather, I find the sentence to be subtly ungrammatical, regardless of the fact that I know what he's saying. One can generally tell very easily what Trump means to say when he uses English ungrammatically, which, as every English speaker knows, he quite often does.

 

[Phaedrus]

No, it was a comment about potentially ambiguous utterances in general.

Does your observation about the sentence from Jane Eyre, then, show that you are probably a pedantic person?

 

[Phaedrus]

I don't think the fact that I can see potential ambiguity in some sentences, particularly when I am discussing ambiguity, makes me particularly pedantic.

But what does your comment on seeing pedantry in others' seeing ambiguities make you? Aggressive?

 

[PaulMatthews]

If ... the wall is not built, which it will be, ...


Reflecting again on Trump's sentence, it all boils down to whether the supplementary relative clause can have the UNnegated main content of the protasis clause as its semantic anchor. Not that the conditional clause is relevant to the answer; it just happens to be there.

We don't have any evidence to go on, though a contact of mine -- a university linguistics professor -- feels that it's probably okay, though he adds that if it is, then this version is also okay "The wall was never built, which it should have been".

Interesting!

 

[jutfrank]

it all boils down to whether the supplementary relative clause can have the UNnegated main content of the protasis clause as its semantic anchor.

I'm a bit lost here. What boils down to what? Of course it's the semantic anchor. We know it is, don't we?

We don't have any evidence to go on, though a contact of mine -- a university linguistics professor -- feels that it's probably okay,

What kind evidence do you mean? "Okay" in what way?

Trump's phrasing was not carefully considered, and thus doesn't make complete sense when analysed word for word, although of course the context made it quite understandable. The supplementary relative clause was clearly intended as a kind of parenthesis to the main thought. He might have said, more intelligibly:

If the wall is not built (, which will not happen,) ...
If the wall is not built (, and it will be,) ...
If the wall is not built (, though it will be,) ...

 

[Phaedrus]

A somewhat parallel case:

?* If he is not guilty, which he is, he will be set free.

I think it's unclear, both in this case and in Trump's tweet, whether the antecedent of "which" includes "not."

He is not guilty.
?* That he is. (= Guilty he is OR Not guilty he is?)

The bridge will not be built.
?* That it will be. ( = Built it will be OR Not built it will be?)