A Richardson relative clause
Then-Presidential candidate Bill Richardson, in the immediate aftermath
of the New Hampshire primary voting, announced:
I want to apologize to all the New
Hampshire voters who I interrupted their meals the last few days.
(Widely reported, for instance in the
Las Cruces Sun-News, in
Richardson's home state, on 8 January. I heard it on NPR's
Morning Edition the next morning.)
This sentence is (a) completely comprehensible (I don't think that any
well-intentioned person who speaks English could mistake its intended
meaning),
(b) thoroughly ungrammatical in standard English, and (c) entirely
unsurprising as a fix for problems in production.
If you're going to produce an English relative clause, here's the
simplest way to do it is: [Note added 1/13: right here I'm in the middle of an
Extris construction; I wrote that extra
is and then realized what I'd done but decided to leave it in anyway, just for fun.] start with the head NP that you want to
modify, and then compose the relative clause from
(1) a single-word relative marker -- a WH
word or that -- that
explicitly announces that a subordinate clause is to follow: the people who/that I met (there's also
the option of an "unmarked" or "zero" relative, as in the people I met, where there's no
explicit marker), and
(2) a clause with a gap in the position where the head NP is to be
interpreted (who/that I met ___); this clause then
either restricts the referent of the head or adds information about
that referent.
Richardson led off with the relative marker
who, and then went on to put
together the rest of the relative clause, which was to be about his
interrupting the meals of lots of New Hampshire voters.
Unfortunately, he chose to make the clause about him: he began the
clause with the subject
I.
He was then committed to an active-voice clause, and he was in
grammatical hot water -- because when he got to referring to the
interrupted meals, the natural position for the gap was as a
determiner, and that's not an acceptable location for a gap:
*all the New Hampshire voters who I
interrupted ____ meals the last few days
Now, he could have opted for a passive-voice clause, with the voters as
the referent of the subject:
who had their meals interrupted by me
...
This is a more complex option than the active-voice version,
however. And to realize that you might want a passive clause, you
need to think ahead to possible problems with the active-voice version.
Or he could have opted for an
of-possessive
rather than a determiner possessive:
who I interrupted the meals of
...
This is grammatical but awkward, and it requires planning for the
postnominal
of-possessive
ahead of time.
Finally, he could have opted for a more complex kind of relative
clause, with an initial multi-word
WH expression:
whose meals I interrupted ...
This requires considerable planning ahead -- formulating the rest of
the relative clause in some detail before even beginning it.
Remember that Richardson was composing the sentence in real time, as he
went along, not just reeling out some rehearsed material. Partway
through the clause he came to the point where he needed to refer to the
meals, and, recognizing that a determiner gap wouldn't fly, he did the
next best thing, namely, use a pronoun determiner (
their) instead. So he
produced a
gapless
relative, of a fairly routine sort.
Not that Richardson did any of this consciously, of course.
[Added 1/13: Several correspondents have pointed out that Richardson speaks Spanish as well as English, so that interference from Spanish might have contributed to the form of the relative clause. Still, the gapless relative he produced is of a familiar type in the speech of monolinguals.]
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at January 12, 2008 03:06 PM