From John McIntyre on Facebook today:
— JM: Today’s Pleonasm Award goes to outlets that referred to Thomas Jacob Sanford, who attacked the Mormon church in Michigan, as an armed gunman.
Archive for the ‘Relativization’ Category
An armed gunman
September 29, 2025This is the day which the Lord hath made
August 6, 2024So begins Psalm 118:24, in the KJV; the verse in full:
24 This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.
Two things: one, the way in which the restrictive relative clause (with non-human antecedent) is marked — here with the relativizer which rather than that, or, unmarked, with no relativizer (in a so-called zero relative); two, the framing of the new day, in which we are exhorted to rejoice, as a gift of God (versus viewing it simply as the welcome granting of another day of life).
I take this up because the late Ann Daingerfield Zwicky was accustomed to greeting the new day by reciting the whole verse, made personal by a shift from 1pl to 1sg, but also with the morphology and syntax altered to fit her own dialect and style — with has instead of the archaic form hath; and with the which relative replaced by the shorter zero relative:
(ADZ) This is the day the Lord has made; I will rejoice and be glad in it
but maintaining her Episcopalian / Anglican creedal commitments; from the Book of Common Prayer (1662):
I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord …
I admired her custom, followed her on the grammar and style, but altered the text to suit me as a non-believer:
(AMZ) This is the day I have been given; I will rejoice and be glad in it
There was a singer had a dog
January 8, 2020The Epiphany Rhymes With Orange is an exercise in cartoon understanding:
(#1)
Without the title and the comment balloon (on the left), the cartoon is still compensible, and funny — this material adds some extra humorous depth — but none of it works at all unless you know the song.
A dark week in early December
December 4, 2017A week of death, punishment, and destruction. This week: deaths on M W F, punishment on Tu, destruction on Th.
(#1) John Cleese as the host on Monty Python’s “It’s Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart” show
Hello again, and welcome to the show. Tonight we continue to look at some famous deaths. Tonight we start with the wonderful death of Genghis Khan, conqueror of India.
Well, acually, today, the 4th, is Frank Zappa (1993). Friday, the 8th, is John Lennon (1980). And Wednesday, the 6th, is Wolfie M. himself (1791). Tomorrow, the 5th, is Krampusnacht, when the Christmas demon Krampus punishes naughty children (the night before St. Nicholas rewards the good ones, on his feast day). And Thursday, the 7th, is Pearl Harbor Day, the anniversary of the Japanese bombing of the naval base in Honolulu, which brough the United States into World War II.
Relativizer choice
January 16, 2013Two recent contributions to my files on restrictive relativizer choice (other than the classic which/that business and the use of that for human referents, both of which are objects of unmerited prescriptivist scorn): a who for human-institution referents and a who for (non-human) animal referents. In both cases, which or that is the prescribed relativizer, and the use of who is an extension granting symbolic human-like status to non-human entities.
Calling resumptive pronouns
June 21, 2012From Chris Waigl yesterday, a sentence from an article on the consequences of flooding at the Lake Superior Zoo in Duluth MN:
[All but one of the animals in the barnyard exhibit — sheep, lambs, goats and the donkey — died in the flooding.] The zoo also lost a snowy owl and a turkey vulture and possibly a raven, which zoo officials can’t determine whether died or escaped.
Here we have relativization “from inside” a subordinate clause (in whether), yielding an “island violation”:
… which zoo officials can’t determine [ whether ___ died or escaped ]
Chris found this straightforwardly unacceptable, and I agree. But we can wonder how the writer ended up with this relative clause, especially when such island violations are usually rescued through the use of a resumptive pronoun:
… which zoo officials can’t determine [ whether they died or escaped ]
This strategy results in a semi-grammatical (but easily processed) clause, which I’ve called a ResIsland (for Resumptive – Island) gapless relative. Examples are easy to find — so easy that I don’t collect all the ones that come past me.
So why go with a “zero subject” clause?
Notes from school
April 15, 2012Last week’s notes from my grand-daughter’s school included this report from a student in the middle school:
In L.A [Language Arts — what used to be called English] we had a lesson on how to organize a story with a follow-up question: Do people make decisions with his head or her heart.
Now, people is plural, used for generic reference, so the standard pronoun anaphoric to it is they (their in the possessive): with their head or (with) their heart. Why go with singular his or her instead?
Two possible factors. One, people doesn’t look plural; it doesn’t have a plural suffix. And two, peevish objections to “singular they“, even with generic antecedents — Everybody thinks either with their head or (with) their heart — have led people to be suspicious of anaphoric they with generic antecedents, even when these are in fact plural. The proscription against singular they has contaminated ordinary anaphoric usage. (For other cases of proscriptions contaminating perfectly innocent constructions, see here.)
Object gap + subject gap
January 27, 2012Caught in a radio news report this morning, this quote from Barack Obama, with the crucial bit boldfaced:
Obama said of a push for less financial regulation and lower taxes. “And why we would want to adopt something that we just tried and did not work, doesn’t make sense.”
This has a relative clause (that we just tried and did not work) in which a clause with an direct object gap (we just tried ___) is coordinated with a clause with a subject gap (___ did not work) [DO + SU]. As I noted in a Language Log posting on “Amazing conjunctions” back in 2005,
coordination of a clause with an object gap … and a clause with a subject gap … is usually judged ungrammatical, though there’s some question about what condition bars it.
In fact, a 1981 paper of Gerald Gazdar’s (“Unbounded dependencies and coordinate structure”, Linguistic Inquiry 12.155-84) treats such examples as ungrammatical and attempts to give an analysis that predicts that. But examples aren’t hard to find, in writing as well as speech; I myself seem to be given to writing relative clauses with this non-parallel structure.
Extraction from adverbial subordinate clause
January 26, 2012Ira Glass on public radio’s This American Life #454, Mr. Daisey and the Apple factory (first aired 1/06/12):
Mike Daisey. His one-man show about Apple is going back on stage this month in New York at the Public Theater. The full show has this entire other story line about Steve Jobs that you will have to buy a theater ticket if you want to hear.
See anything notable about that last sentence? Many people don’t, though there’s some tradition in the syntactic literature for treating it as problematic.
Punctuating relatives
November 23, 2011The beginning of the Wikipedia entry on hair:
(1) Hair is a filamentous biomaterial, that grows from follicles found in the dermis.
At first this looks like that as a non-restrictive relativizer, but in fact which is not really an improvement:
(2) Hair is a filamentous biomaterial, which grows from follicles found in the dermis.
The intended reading is surely restrictive — corresponding to either of the alternatives:
(3a) Hair is a filamentous biomaterial that grows from follicles found in the dermis.
(3b) Hair is a filamentous biomaterial which grows from follicles found in the dermis.
Instead, (1) has the that from (3a) together with the punctuation of (2). How could that happen?