which vs. that
Wayne Citrin
"which" and "that"?
Thank you.
Wayne Citrin
(ucbvax!citrin)
Jeffrey Goldberg
is some misleading information in my posting which is best to
clarify as soon as possible.
In article <2...@su-russell.ARPA> gold...@su-russell.UUCP
(Jeffrey Goldberg (that's me)) writes:
> The COMP
>people use a(n) historical argument that is rather subtle. The
>deictic pronoun "that" and the sentential COMP "that" evolved from
>a common source (a pronoun). The split between the two occurred
>prior the development of the "that" in RCs. Historical linguistic
>theory predicts that one will never find a COMP turning into a PN,
>while the other direction is just fine. Therefore the "that" in an
>RC can't be a PN or RP.
> I will say that a majority of modern syntacticians believe
>in the RP analysis without question.
Actually, the particular argument I mentioned for the COMP
analysis has not appeared in print. The argument (if I
represented it at all accurately) is due to Nancy Wiegand
Assistant Professor of Linguistics and English at the University
of Michigan, Ann Arbor. My previous posting suggested that
this idea had been around for a while, while in fact Wiegand's
argument has not appeared in print and has not been
distributed.
The RP argument has been around for quite a while and has worked
its way into many accounts relative clauses. For a recent
example see Gerald Gazdar's "Unbounded Dependencies and
Coordinate Structures" in Linguistic Inquiry 198[12]. I do not,
of hand, know the original source for that argument.
In general, much of what I post the this newsgroup is based on
the work of various colleagues and instructors. Given the
informality of USENET I have not made citations that I would
have in a more scholarly write-up. So I ask that if anyone
wants to use of refer to anything that I have posted, please get
in touch with me to get the appropriate references. In the
future I will try to be careful about attribution of ideas. In
the past I have only cited what I would call recommended
reading. Because of the immediacy and the vastness of the net
many ideas of "prepublication nature" get distributed in an
informal way. This means that when we sit down to work we must
take an extra effort to find the sources of various ideas and
facts which may have been developed through our contact with the
net.
I realize that there are probably no more than a handful of
professional linguists reading sci.lang (at least the ratio of
postings about grammar/spelling/usage flames to issues of "the
science of language" seem to suggest this.) I still feel that
it is important to point this out.
Jeff Goldberg
ARPA: gold...@russell.stanford.edu, gold...@csli.stanford.edu
UUCP: ...!hplabs!russell.stanford.edu!goldberg
cryptography, terrorist, DES, drugs, cipher, secret, decode,
NSA, CIA, NRO.
The above is food for the NSA line eater. Add it to your
.signature and you too can help overflow the NSA's ability to
scan all traffic going in or out of the USA looking for
"significant" words. (I am told that this is no joke.)
Stevan Harnad
(Wayne Citrin) writes:
> Will someone please explain the distinction between the relative pronouns
> "which" and "that"?
The technical distinction concerns "restricted vs nonrestricted
clauses." Fowler had proposed that these should formally distinguish where
one or the other can be used, because otherwise usage seemed to be
varying randomly.
A restrictive clause is one whose removal would alter the basic
message of a sentence. According to this RC/NRC rule, it should be
introduced by "that": Helen's is the face that launched a thousand
ships.
A nonrestrictive clause is supplementary, incidental or even
parenthetical to the basic message of the sentence: Helen's face,
which was not unblemished upon close inspection, launched a thousand
ships. A heuristic rule is that usually a nonrestrictive clause is or
can be set off by commas, whereas a restrictive one can't.
That having been said, let me add that Fowler's tentative proposal for
bringing order to the arbitrary use of which and that was itself
rather arbitrary, since there are perfectly good examples where say, "that"
is preferable in an NRC for emphasis and "which" is preferable in an RC
to avoid a proliferation of "that"'s or simply to preserve or restore
a good anglo-saxon flavour.
Rules are for pedants and analphabets; stylists will always adapt them
to the uncodifiable higher purposes literary language is really meant
for.
--
Stevan Harnad (609) - 921 7771
{allegra, bellcore, seismo, rutgers, packard} !princeton!mind!harnad
harnad%mi...@princeton.csnet
Jay F. Rosenberg
>
> Rules are for pedants and analphabets; stylists will always adapt them
> to the uncodifiable higher purposes literary language is really meant
> for.
Would that it were so! I have spent uncounted hours restoring
'which's that had dutifully been altered to 'that's by presumably-well-
educated copy editors obeisant to the restrictive/non-restrictive clause
rule. Since 'that' does journeyman work as a demonstrative pronoun and as a
subordinating conjunction, I (a philosopher, whose professional interests
often require special attention to those grammatical roles) have developed a
style in which 'which' tends, fairly generally, to replace 'that' in its
additional relative pronoun role. By "developed a style" I mean that I
write in such a way that the sentences not only convey what I wish them to
convey but also *sound* right. Such considerations, however, are simply
lost on copy editors, whose horizons, as far as I can determine,
characteristically extend no further than Webster's, Fowler's, and their own
publishers' style sheets.
JAY ROSENBERG Dept. of Philosophy UNC Chapel Hill, NC 27514
=========================================================================
...{decvax,akgua}!mcnc!ecsvax!unbent unb...@ecsvax.UUCP
...tucc!tuccvm!ecsvax!unbent unb...@ecsvax.BITNET
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Michael Maxwell
(Wayne Citrin) writes:
> Will someone please explain the distinction between the relative pronouns
> "which" and "that"?
There is some (rather equivocal) evidence that wh-words like "which" occupy a
different "slot" in COMP from complementizers like "that." I know of no good
arguments for this in Modern English (although I believe people said things
like "the book which that you saw" in earlier periods of English). But there
are arguments for a distinction from other languages, e.g for Bavarian German;
cf.:
%A Josef Bayer
%D 1984
%T Towards an explanation of certain that-\fIt\fP phenomena: The COMP-node in
Bavarian
%B Sentential Complementation
%E W. de Geest and Y. Putseys
%P 23-32
%I Foris Publications
%C Dordrecht
Apparently you can say things equivalent to "I wonder who that you saw" in
Spanish, at least in some dialects. But even if wh-words in other
languages are distinct from complementizers, it doesn't necessarily follow that
they are in English.
--
Mike Maxwell
Boeing Advanced Technology Center
...uw-beaver!uw-june!bcsaic!michaelm
Phil Smith
>
> cryptography, terrorist, DES, drugs, cipher, secret, decode,
> NSA, CIA, NRO.
> The above is food for the NSA line eater. Add it to your
> .signature and you too can help overflow the NSA's ability to
> scan all traffic going in or out of the USA looking for
> "significant" words. (I am told that this is no joke.)
from what i hear it is the truth, but the overload would only be temporary.
At some point in time the NSA would decide to spend more of 'our' tax
dollars to buy some more Crays to keep up with the traffic.
--
decvax!cwruecmp!ncoast!smith
ncoast is dead, long live ncoast!
ncoast!sm...@case.csnet
(ncoast!smith%case....@csnet-relay.ARPA)
Martin Taylor
>... (a philosopher, whose professional interests
>often require special attention to those grammatical roles) have developed a
>style in which 'which' tends, fairly generally, to replace 'that' in its
>additional relative pronoun role. By "developed a style" I mean that I
>write in such a way that the sentences not only convey what I wish them to
>convey but also *sound* right. Such considerations, however, are simply
Humpty-Dumpty also believed that he had the right to be master over the
meanings of his words. The question is whether what you write uses the
same language as your readers believe it does. If you alter the rules,
and write your personal language enough, it will sound right to you, and
mislead your audience. After having had copy-editors alter hundreds of
my "which"s to "that"s, I now find improper usage really grating. The
restrictive/non-restrictive distinction is always important, and sometimes
non-redundant. If you don't stick to it when the reader CAN restore the
meaning, how will the reader know what you mean when he/she can't?
For example " ... letter confusions which maintain the word envelope ..."
is quite different from " ... letter confusions that maintain the word
envelope ..." but if you use "which" and "that" inconsistently, how will
anyone know what you mean? I use this example deliberately, because a
theoretical argument happened to turn on such a mis-use.
--
Martin Taylor
{allegra,linus,ihnp4,floyd,ubc-vision}!utzoo!dciem!mmt
{uw-beaver,qucis,watmath}!utcsri!dciem!mmt