An ivory-billed relative clause
Matthew Hutson wrote me (a while ago, actually, back at the
beginning of September) to ask this:
I'm aware of the general Language Log consensus on
the which/that "rule": which is acceptable in most
places where adherents to the rule would argue that is required.
But what about the rare reverse case:
"The key point, that all the popular reports missed, is that FOXP2 is
a transcription factor..."
(http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/ ~myl/ languagelog/ archives/ 002456.html)
Would which — or else the removal of the commas, depending
on what he meant — be required here?
Thanks
Matt
Great question. The answer is no, it's not wrong; no correction
is needed; but it is true that the subordinator that is now
fantastically rare in the role of introducing what
The Cambridge
Grammar calls a supplementary relative (a more traditional name
for them is "appositive" or "non-restrictive" relative clauses). It used
to be more common (Jespersen's grammar cites a few), but today you have to
hunt around for months and months to find a single example, and it could
be years. But Matt has spotted one. The sentence he quotes, which I
quoted from an article about the FOXP2 gene in a post I didn't want to
interrupt in order to comment, is a genuine case of a recent modern
English supplementary relative clause introduced by that. Treasure
it, Matt. It's like spotting the syntactic analog of an ivory-billed
woodpecker.
Some rather grouchy email from a couple of correspondents suggests
to me that I should clarify at least three things about the above.
-
The example is not a perfect sighting of the
ivory-bill; it's just
a blurred video frame. Ideally you should be able to tell from
the syntax of the construction that it can't be anything other than
a supplementary relative. This is sometimes possible, but not here.
The example could just be referring to the key point that all the
popular reports missed, and putting in commas erroneously. But my
reading of the context of the original was that he was saying that
the key point was that FOXP2 is a transcription factor, and all
the popular reports had missed that — not merely that this
was the key point from among those that the popular reports had missed,
but that it was the key point. If I'm right, then this is a supplementary
relative. [Update, December 4: And I am
right. I contacted the author of the sentence, Alec MacAndrew, and asked him
what sense he had in mind when he wrote
the
article in question. He has kindly confirmed that I correctly divined his intention: he did indeed intend the supplementary semantics,
where the meaning is "The key point — and incidentally, all
the popular reports missed it — is that FOXP2 is a transcription
factor". So we do have a genuine observation here.]
-
The reason I don't simply say that with an occurrence rate that
low the construction is simply ungrammatical is just that I'm
conservative enough to think that the language changes only slowly
and we shouldn't be hurrying it up. Supplementary relatives with
that are now extremely rare, but not totally impossible
to find. Though I will add this: if teachers taught foreign students
that they were simply not grammatical at all, and copy-editors
refused to allow them to reach print, they would not be far
wrong, and it would do no great harm. (This is not the case with
restrictive relatives with which; those are very common,
and to teach that they are ungrammatical would be tantamount to
lying to the students.)
-
But you certainly can't use that to introduce a supplementary
relative clause if the head noun is human; it is totally ungrammatical:
*I asked Vice Chancellor Bradshaw, that I have known for
many years, whether he agreed. Even examples such as these used
to occur, around a hundred years ago, but I don't think they could
be regarded as anything other than a mistake today.
Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at December 1, 2005 05:28 PM