Talk:Relativizer

We would like to move the article in our Talk page to the Main Space of the Relativizer article, which already exists. Vletawsky (talk) 05:33, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

I'll do this for you and merge the page histories shortly; first, though, I'm going to have to take out all your signatures... Yunshui 雲‍水 14:13, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

 Done Yunshui 雲‍水 14:19, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

1. Content a) The first paragraph within the article has some grammar issues as there is a sentence within brackets that could be a sentence on its own. In the last sentence of the first paragraph of the article, there is some bracketed information that is redundant and not necessary. The section ‘Relativizer Typology’ is not as well-written as the sections that precede it as it is confusing due to formatting issues. The examples should make use of bolding, underlining, italicizing and tables or charts to make it easier to read instead of using bullet points. Information about invariable relativizers should be included in the article with its own heading and examples. Citations [4] and [5] should also be placed in the correct places. Overall, it is a well-written article with great information.

b) The article would be more comprehensive if information pertaining to invariable relativizers is included. Other than that, the article is quite comprehensive as it includes many examples from different languages. Because the English examples provided do not have citations, they appear to have been created by the group, presumably as native English speakers, which is a good application of critical thinking.

c) The article is well-researched and includes the main relevant points.

d) Everything in the article is neutral and statements do not contradict one another.

e) All information is stable.

2. Style

a) The lead section is informative but short. This sections could be improved with some discussion as to what is included in the rest of the article.

b) The structure of the section ‘Relativizer Typology’ can be improved by using proper formatting and putting the information already in the section in a table.

c) Citations are inconsistent within this article. Citations [4] and [5] should be placed properly within the article. The sections ‘Relativizers of Modern English’ and ‘Pronominal Relativizers’ should include citations in the correct places. Citations in this article uses proper citation style.

3. Images

Article requires no images.

4. Length This article appears to be focused and in summary style without many unnecessary details. Some sections however are quite short and could be elaborated on more thoroughly, such as the lead section and the ‘Relativizers of Modern English sections. The ‘Relativizers of Modern English’ section is very brief and only introduces the topics but includes no further detail about them, which may have been useful. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jleong92 (talk • contribs) 04:45, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

Relativer: A Linguistic Fable

Once upon a time, a well-intentioned linguist who was sitting all alone in a basement, attic or perhaps a beautiful garden, aptly decided that the term relative pronoun was an unfortunate misnomer given its syntactic function. And so, in a stroke of inspirational genius, the well-intentioned linguist coined the term, relativizer as his or her brainchild. Alas, the well-intentioned linguist lacked the prescience to see how the relativizer neologism would spawn a handsome amount of linguistic consternation in a manner reminiscent of the poor relative pronoun whose terminological usage it was intended to supplant. Alas, both the outmoded relative pronoun and its ill-begotten relativizer progeny live on while their lesser-known but robust kin - the appositive conjunction and nominal conjunction - dwell in virtual obscurity despite their affinity to interlingual consistency.

The End. Kent Dominic 22:22, 10 January 2020 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kent Dominic (talk • contribs)

Uh, while I am certainly an admirer and frequent user of this style of writing , in this context so unnecessarily florid and melodramatic (not intrinsically negative characteristics) that it is effectively pointless. Also, given your apparent familiarity with linguistic terminology you are surely aware that the entirety of linguistics as an academic discipline shares the same problem - someone coined a term that turned out to be counterproductive, it was supplanted by a subsequent neologism that also turned out to be counterproductive, repeat ad infinitum. Whether or not a term is robust is both a matter of opinion as the vast majority of human languages have not been studied or at best have been subject to “study” consisting entirely of biased and racist preconceptions. Additionally, language is of course continually rapidly evolving such that it outpaces current efforts to even describe it, let alone analyze it.

I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you this with some goal other than self-aggrandizement, but I’m having trouble determining what said goal could possibly be. Could you please clarify? Andyharbor (talk) 17:29, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

@Andyharbor: No self-aggrandizement. Just a bit of humor sprinkled on top of what makes me laugh when I consider how seriously attached some folks are to flawed linguistic analysis and corresponding taxonomies. My main point stems from the cross-linguistic element of all this: i.e., the degree of difficulty or ease certain terms imply. By that I mean "relativizer" - the term, not the concept - has no functional equivalent in other languages except as translated by linguists. You're pretty much doomed if you try to figure out what relativizer is supposed to mean unless you're a native English speaker and also have higher than average linguistic interest. By contrast, "conjunction" is universally recognized both terminologically and conceptually. Similarly, appositive and nominal are universally salient, regardless of language. For me, regarding practicability from a pedological standpoint, it just makes better sense to take a (lexically functional) syntactic approach to linguistics as opposed to a dependency grammar approach.

Perhaps a better way to illustrate my frustration relates to the terms, past participle and present participle. Neither term makes intuitive sense to someone who wonders what "I'm surprised has to do with the past, or what "I was singing has to do with the present. (Indeed, past participle was coined in 1798 because of its preterit form, not its syntactic function; present participle was coined in 1896 as a matter of terminological contrast despite the linguistic anomalies.) For me, it makes infinitely better sense to refer to those terms as "perfective participle" and "continuative participle," which (1) more accurately describes their respective linguistic functions, (2) are universally recognized both terminologically and linguistically, and (3) are based on historicity that dates to 500 B.C.

"But, Kent, we've had past participle and present participle for so long, and everyone understands what they mean," the traditionalists complain.

"You mean native English speakers who have more than a passing interest in grammar know what they mean," is my rebuttal. "Non-native English speakers who struggle to reconcile those terms (and their actual syntactic functions) with their own languages are told to just memorize a list of interpolations re. the 'I'm surprised' and 'I was singing' and 'They will have arrived' kinds of examples. 'Perfective' (i.e. 'complete' in the sense that corresponds to the perfect tenses) and 'continuative' (i.e. 'ongoing' in the sense that corresponds to a progressive or continuous aspect) are instantly recognizable on a cross-linguistic basis. So, 'I am surprised ' entails a perfective participle; NOT a past participle that is inexplicably used in the present tense; NOT a past simple verb despite its coterminous form; definitely NOT an adjective despite its adjectival use."

End of rant(s). For today. Cheers. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 01:13, 3 September 2020 (UTC)

Coda to "A Linguistic Fable"

IMHO, this article rightly identifies "relativizer" as being a conjunction instead of a pronoun but loses linguistic salience by associating it with the term, relative clause (which often isn't a clause but rather is a verb phrase if not just a verb, and in either case is traditionally stuck with a Holocene name). I'd be content to see "relativizer" used in a specialty instance, i.e. to describe how a word such as "that" morphed from its use as an incipital clause during the 16th century (e.g. from "That city which was my original hometown is Milwaukee") to the subordinate use of today (e.g. "Milwaukee is the city that was my original hometown"). Still, no way in H-E-double-hockey-sticks am I otherwise using such a fancy-schamncey term as relativizer, relativizeristic, relativizeristician, relativizeristicianshiptarisnism, etc. Does anyone (besides, perhaps @Mathglot:) really care? I ain't holding my breath. Just another day, another idle rant. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 03:40, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

P.S. @Mathglot: I used my web browser's "read aloud" function to hear how it would say, "relativizeristicianshiptarisnism." Not a bad performance and well worth a listen. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 03:40, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

REL or RELZ abbreviation

At List_of_glossing_abbreviations REL is used for relative but RELZ for relativizer. Not so in this article. What should be done? -- Evertype·✆ 14:15, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

Change it! Bathrobe (talk) 23:32, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

Restrictive and nonrestrictive

Back in December 2013, a month when there was a veritable orgy of editing on this article as a school project, one Hlnehera (who has long departed from editing Wikipedia) got his facts muddled up when he added this section on "Restrictive vs. Nonrestrictive clauses":

Start of added section

Restrictive relative clauses have semantic properties (to do with meaning) which make them necessary to prevent the sentence from being ambiguous. Commas mark restrictive relative clauses, and only the wh-relativizers can be used to introduce them. Nonrestrictive relative clauses add extraneous information that is not vital for the listener or reader’s understanding of the sentence’s exact meaning. Both wh-relativizers and the that-relativizer can be used to introduce nonrestrictive sentences. To exemplify:

• Restrictive sentences:

A) "I met a man and a woman yesterday. The woman, [who had a thick French accent], was very pretty."

B) "I met a man and a woman yesterday. The woman *[that had a thick French accent] was very pretty."

• Nonrestrictive sentences:

C) "I met two women yesterday, one with a thick French accent and one with a mild Italian one. The woman [who had the thick French accent] was very pretty."

D) "I met two women yesterday, one with a thick French accent and one with a mild Italian one. The woman [that had the thick French accent] was very pretty."

Sentences (A) and (B) above are examples of nonrestrictive clauses, because since their context is in the mention of one man and one woman, we only need to know the gender of the person being talked about to understand who is being referred to. Therefore the details in the relative clause about the woman’s accent are irrelevant and aren’t necessary for the disambiguation of the sentence. Also note that the sentence without commas that is using the that-relativizer is ungrammatical.

Sentences (C) and (D) is an example of a restrictive clause, because the context is the mention of two different women, and so the information in the relative clause about the accent of the woman is necessary to discern which woman is being talked about, and to prevent the sentence from becoming ambiguous. These sentences are grammatical irrespective of the type of relativizer that introduces their relative clauses.

End of added section

This was exacerbated by an edit made by the same user a little later, when even the function of the two types of clause was transposed.

It is remarkable that, despite the lashings of "state-of-the-art" grammatical theory that were unleashed on the entry that month, an elementary confusion between restrictive and nonrestrictive relative clauses was introduced that a simple teacher of grammar could have picked up. And apart from Andyharbor, who noticed a discrepancy in the examples, nobody has fixed it for an entire decade.

Bathrobe (talk) 19:29, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

I constantly shake my head at the equivalent of the article's uncited assertions that (1) "[r]estrictive relative clauses have semantic properties which make them necessary to prevent the sentence from being ambiguous..." and (2) "[n]onrestrictive relative clauses add extraneous information that is not vital for the listener or reader's understanding of which aforementioned noun is being referenced." I have a perfectly rational albeit pecuniary reason for not fixing it: my edits would be similarly uncited original research that I'd rather not give away for free. I've been content to rant about it here et seq.

Otherwise, I'd delete this article's entire section on Restrictiveness of the relative clause determines distribution. I wouldn't delete it just cuz of how I snub the whole antiquated relative clause terminology, but because its discussion in this article seems needlessly ancillary at best besides being equivocal re the nonrestrictive sentences examples that include "who" as pronouns rather than as *gulp* relativizers.

If you take a hatchet to this article in the manner that my fellow scaredy cat and I have neglected, please consider making an emendment regarding how a *ahem* relativizer:

• may be omitted to conjoin the subject of an ensuing clause (e.g., "The Paris that I love") as a *yuck* zero relativizer
• may be omitted to conjoin a similarly elided participial phrase premised on a stative verb (e.g., "The woman who is sitting near the window"; "I adopted the cat that was found outside my back door"
• may be omitted to conjoin a pronoun and a similarly elided phrase comprising a stative verb + predicative adjective (e.g., "Tell me something that is new")
• may NOT be omitted to conjoin a verb phrase (e.g., "New York is the city that never sleeps") without risking - in cases of polysemy - a contextually relevant change in meaning (e.g., "I saw the car that hit you" < "I afterward saw the car that hit you" versus "I contemporaneously saw the car as it hit you")

Another comment: I'm led to believe that until the 16th century, people said stuff like, "That the actors are on strike is bad" and "That she was friendly he told her." Afterward, the fashion became, "It's bad that the actors are on strike" and "He told her that she was friendly." Wikipedia articles term the that in such instances are conjoining a content clause, aka noun clause, etc., as predicative object. I agree with that analysis despite how I abhor the taxonomy. Anyway, this article's "I wonder what inspired them" and "I wonder whose dog died" examples include *bleh* content clauses with the pronoun what and the determiner whose, respectively, rather than *ick* relativizers.

Finally, in my own lexicon, I address this stuff along simplified conceptual lines:

• An adjectival clause entailing a comma + pronoun renders a parenthetic adjectival clause: e.g., "I saw the movie, which Doric Loon recommended, and I liked it."
• An adjectival clause entailing an adjectival conjunction without a comma renders a syndetic adjectival clause: "I saw the movie that Doric Loon recommended." (See syndeton.)
• An adjectival clause with a zero adjectival conjunction renders an asyndetic adjectival clause: "I saw the movie Doric Loon recommended." (See asyndeton.)

You can see the trend in my bias against well-meaning but arcane terms like content clause and relativizer that require specific familiarity with linguistic substance. Some folks might say my terms are no less arcane, but any schmuck can use an ordinary dictionary look up and figure out the composite meaning of my terms based on their SUP. Or, doing an AI translation of the SUP yields sensible results, which can't be done if you translate, e.g., "nonrestrictive + relative + clause".

An AI English to Korean translation of content clause yields "세부 정보, 세부 사항, 내용은, 정보, 자세히, 상세 정보" or "details, details, details, information, details, details clause". An AI English to Spanish translation of relativizer yields "parienta" (feminine parent) and "pariente" (masculine parent). 😒 Kent Dominic·(talk) 18:18, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

Many thanks to Kent for this comment.

I will not address the terminological issue which Kent raises. Every field has its specialist terminology divorced from everyday usage, although grammar and linguistics appear to be a rather extreme example of this. (Incidentally, Google Translate is pretty bad at translating this kind of terminology, as your Korean example shows. It's generally better between European languages, which use etymologically related terminology.)

However, his criticism of the characterisation of restrictive clauses ("have semantic properties which make them necessary to prevent the sentence from being ambiguous") and nonrestrictive relative clauses ("add extraneous information that is not vital for the listener or reader's understanding of which aforementioned noun is being referenced") is spot on. My first concern in introducing this note was the spectacular way in which the person who wrote this section lacked a basic understanding of which type of clause is restrictive and which is not. But the characterisation itself is also very poor. How exactly has the usual description of restrictive relative clauses as "defining" or "restricting" the referent (antecedent) been transformed into a means of "preventing a sentence from being ambiguous"? There doesn't appear to be a specific source for this formulation. It almost appears that the writer has adopted some kind of personal interpretation (possibly gained from somewhere in the literature) while not actually understanding how it actually works.

The entire entry does need to be rewritten, firstly to correct such issues, and secondly to integrate and harmonise what seems to be poorly digested material -- both within the entry itself and in relation to other entries (such as relative clause). The specialised and technical nature of the entry and its sources needs to leavened with some kind of explanation in order to make it accessible to a general readership. At the moment it is written within the framework of one particular theory and is likely to appear esoteric and incomprehensible to the average reader. Bathrobe (talk) 20:12, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Well then, why don't you rewrite this monstrosity? I'd be happy to lend a hand with any necessary tweaks. Given my own work's criticism of the crap in the article, I don't want to manifest an obvious conflict of interest by doing the edits in the first instance. I'm happy to back any industrious editor who takes the lead. Go for it! If you wait till next year to obtain my book and cite it here instead, I'll add you to my list of scaredy cats. 😉 Kent Dominic·(talk) 22:53, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Basically because rewriting would be a huge job, probably needing months. A generative framework is not something that can be easily converted into something that ordinary people can understand, a lot of material would need to be added or modified, and a lot of sources would need to be digested and added. The entire framework would possibly have to be changed. Very few people are qualified to deal with a topic such as this from a global, knowledgeable viewpoint. At the moment I simply don't have the depth of knowledge and insight to do this, nor do I have the time as I'm concentrating on other projects. Bathrobe (talk) 09:09, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

I hear ya.

I just made some edits that are mere window dressing. I held my nose while doing all that since I had to cave to using the traditional terms most everyone except yours truly seems to blithely accept without blinking. I didn't cite Pinnock's A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language re the coinage of relative pronoun. I'll leave that to you if you have the real goods. It's also worth adding to the relative pronoun article. Cheers. Kent Dominic·(talk) 19:01, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Ward's Grammar is an earlier and better source, although that doesn't date to 1712. The bigger problem is that while 1712 is given in the entry, there does not appear to be any source to back this up. Bathrobe (talk) 19:03, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

There are actually larger problems with the entry. For instance, https://glossary.sil.org defines Relativizer thus:

"A relativizer is a subordinating conjunction that links a relative clause to its head noun.

It is distinguishable from a relative pronoun in that it does not have a nominal function within the relative clause."

Under this definition, only "that" is a Relativizer. Wh- relativizers are relative pronouns, not relativizers. That fits within a broader linguistic discussion, dating back to Ward at least, over whether "that" is really a "relative pronoun".

It was wrong to define "relativizer" as it is defined in this article without indicating the larger context, namely that there are different definitions of "relativizer", and that this one lies within one branch of generative grammar. This should all have been clarified before they rather dogmatically stated their definition.

In fact, "that" outside of its use in relative clauses is more usually classed as a complementiser in generative grammar, so my comment below on Ouhallian analysis is even more apt. The students who wrote this entry were basically out of their depth, and virtually everyone involved, including User:Jleong92, has long since departed Wikipedia. Bathrobe (talk) 19:33, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

You're right on all counts with one exception: conjunctions like where, when etc., can act as *ahem* relativizers. (E.g., "the place where we met"; "a time when things went awry". Deeming who to be a relativizer is grammatically problematic since it invokes the connundrum of the colloquial "people who [conjunction] we saw" versus the formal "people whom [pronoun] we saw".)

As I mentioned, my most recent edits to the article were mere window dressing. By contrast, your comments here go to the meat of various issues we've discussed at Doric Loon's talk page. Why don't you incorporate the bases and cites from your most recent post into the article here? It shouldn't take that long. Again, I'd do it myself but for the conflict of interest I described earlier.

NOTE: The assertion that "[A relativizer] is distinguishable from a relative pronoun in that it does not have a nominal function within the relative clause" is a very weirdly worded absent a fuller context. In my own lexicon, I account for the distinction by differentiating:

• a conjunction + asyndetic adjectival clause (e.g. "the work that [conjunction] I hope to finish"
• a conjunction + asyndetic adjectival phrase (e.g. "the work that [conjunction] needs finishing"
• a comma + a parenthetic adjectival clause (e.g. "the work, which [pronoun] I need to finish, is almost done").

If I were to edit that glossary.sil.org assertion, I'd say "A relativizer is distinguishable from a relative pronoun in that a relativizer premises a relative clause but is not of the clause while a relative pronoun has pronominal function within a relative clause".

To be clearer on my own conflict of interest, I shun the term subordinating conjunction so I'd be remiss to edit the article using that terminology. I'd nonetheless applaud the article's citation of subordinating conjunction as sourced from glossary.sil.org. I've yet to come across any linguistic source that distinguishes a so-called relative pronoun (1) as corrolated with a clause versus (2) as corrolated with a phrase (e.g., "bought the shirt that fit best") or a mere word (e.g., "bought the only shirt that fit"), so I suspect no editors might interpolate any of the foregoing NOTE into this article. Cheers. Kent Dominic·(talk) 06:23, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

Yes, where and when are traditionally known as relative adverbs, although I've never had an instinctive feel for the distinction from relative pronouns.

As for editing the entry, writing comments on the talk page is both quick and enjoyable, but editing the entry itself would be a much more meticulous and time-consuming process. This topic lies within my area of interest but I'm afraid other more urgent work claims my attention. Perhaps later.

PS: Your edit changing 'not actually realized' to 'omitted' is both innocuous and problematic. 'Omitted' is the "commonsense" version. 'Not actually realized' is a claim that the form exists in the deep structure (or DS) but does not gain expression in the surface form. The two terms are almost equivalent, but 'not actually realized' is a claim about the way the sentence is generated from a deeper level. 'Omitted' simply claims that the speaker or writer left it out. Bathrobe (talk) 11:57, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

Rather than quibble re the semantics of omitted versus not actually realized, I just edited the article to account for any hair splitting. For the logicians out there, the word or – when interpreted as an inclusive disjunction rather than as an exclusive conjunction – creates an superposition within a binary pair of lexical items. In other words, it's a semantic punt from committing to one item in the pair. That use of or is one of my favorite, go-to, lexicological tricks.

As for your reticence in editing the article, just use The Wikipedia Be Bold Strategy. You'll likely interpolate some stuff with which I disagree since I elsewhere lambast some of the crap evident in my own edits to the article. E.g., I hardly agree with my edit that "relativizers and relative pronouns perform the same function by way of introducing a relative clause." It's a ridiculous statement despite how that's the box traditional grammarists and linguists have created for themselves.

Note to anyone who memorializes the edit history of this article and wants to shame me as either duplicitous, wrong, or just plain stupid: Some of my edits to this article merely report various elements in the wacky world of linguistic taxonomies, not that I subscribe to such paradoxes and non sequiturs, so don't shoot or shade the messenger! 😜 Kent Dominic·(talk) 14:22, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

Rather than quibble re the semantics

I'm not quibbling; merely pointing out that your edit departs from the spirit of the grammatical theory that underlies the entry as it stands. It's a bit of a guerrilla tactic, so to speak; a subtle hit-and-run without actually neutralising the target's main force.

a ridiculous statement despite how that's the box traditional grammarists and linguists have created for themselves. Linguistics (including grammatical studies) has always been a struggle to systematically capture and label the features of language. Boxes be boxes, no matter how hard you try to justify or modulate them. Look forward to your (hopefully unboxy) book. (Incidentally, SIL, or Summer Institute of Linguistics, is a school that is closely related to the structuralist flavoured linguistics of Kenneth Pike and also has connections to missionary work. I cited the definition not because I agree with that particular school but to demonstrate that the term "relativizer" is not necessarily used in the way it is defined in this entry.

As for editing the article, I'm quite happy to be bold; I just don't have time at the moment. I've become involved here because it is intimately related to a project that I urgently need to complete, but I can't afford to be completely sidetracked at this stage.

I'm familiar with the distinction between the two or's. Interestingly, there is a split in usage for the equivalent Mongolian term between Mongolia (independent country) and Inner Mongolia (in China). (Doing actual languages does at time yield insights.) Bathrobe (talk) 17:33, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

I didn't respond earlier to this one:

I've yet to come across any linguistic source that distinguishes a so-called relative pronoun (1) as corrolated with a clause versus (2) as corrolated with a phrase (e.g., "bought the shirt that fit best") or a mere word (e.g., "bought the only shirt that fit")

According to your proposal, these two are of a totally different nature (sorry, my past tense of "fit" is "fitted"):

• The shirt fitted best (yielding a phrase in correlation)
• The shirt fitted (yielding a single word in correlation)

I'm afraid that in this case your "boxes" make no sense to me.

Presumably your "relative clause" would involve "the shirt" as object, e.g., "bought the shirt that he showed me". Am I correct?

Perhaps you'd like to elaborate.... Bathrobe (talk) 20:22, 24 March 2024 (UTC)

_____

@Bathrobe:Re "quibble..." I wasn't making an accusation, I was recusing myself from doing so by conceding your point without detailing how I see it a bit differently. On to the substance...

In condensed senses of these terms, I distinguish a clause (entailing a subject and predicate) versus a phrase (two or more words sans a subject) versus a word (a discrete lexical item that is independently capable of use with objective or practical meaning in a spoken, written, or conceptual context.) Accordingly, even knuckleheads should agree "I smell the bread that you are baking" contains "you are baking" as a clause. Some traditional twerps deem the example's "that" to be a relative pronoun; neo-twerps call it a relativizer; I call it it an adjectival conjunction.

Ignore my laughter at this assertion by traditional twerps: the relative pronoun that in "I smell the bread that you are baking" is a pronominal part of the that you are baking clause. Don't fall for that semantic bait-and-switch! Meaning, if "that" is a pronoun substituting for bread, it equates to "I smell the bread bread you are baking." Neo-twerps make the better argument how the that is a relativizer (i.e., a conjunction) apart from the "you are baking" clause.

Here's where the traditional twerps and the neo-twerps go haywire... Neither camp invariably distinguishes between (a) a clause marker for the you are baking clause in the "I smell the bread that you are baking" example versus (2) a whatchamacallit marker for the phrase (i.e., a verb phrase) in a "I smell the bread that is baking" example.

• As traditional twerps insist the latter example contains a relative pronoun that as a pronominal referent for bread, how does the convoluted semantic substitution of "I smell the bread bread is baking" make sense despite granting how "I smell the bread bread is baking" constitutes a *ahem* relative clause?
• As neo-twerps insist that "I smell the bread that is baking" contains a relativizer, how can it be rationalized that "is baking" constitutes a *phew* relative clause rather than – what, a relative phrase? Then, does "I smell the bread that baked" include "baked" as a relative word? Oy vey!

The article gives only one such spurious example: "I have friends that are moving in together" is presented as a relativizer + relative clause.

I hope the foregoing addresses your question about my premise regarding how parsing the grammar of various constructions involving a clause versus a phrase versus a word yields an attenuated application of the whole relative clause terminology. Of course, conceptually speaking, the semantic sense of a given sentence isn't dependent on what linguistic knuckleheads, twerps, and geeks call the lexical constitutents of the sentence. My geeky point is that both the traditional and newer terms yield terminological inconsistencies that I refuse to use, indulge, or accommodate. Yeah, I rant about it on these talk pages, but not in my own lexicon. Instead, I simply painstakingly constructed a linguistic taxonomy with, dare I say, none of the paradoxes evident in the more familiar linguistic jargon. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 19:27, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

I think I understand where you are coming from. As I have pointed out to you elsewhere, doubts about the classification of "that" as a relative pronoun had already been raised by Ward in his grammar of the English language (1767). Did you check it out?

The neo-twerps, as you call them, do not appear to pretend that "that" somehow stands for the antecedent (or head, depending on your terminology). Nor do modern typologists. In my understanding, they would maintain that "bread" has been gapped (deleted) from the relative clause in the process of generating it. "That" is then inserted as a relativiser, thereby marking the clause as a relative clause, but does not function as a pronoun for "bread". This distinguishes relativisers from relative pronouns, such as "which", which do stand for the antecedent "bread" in a sentence like "I smell the bread which you are baking". The two types would be generated differently. (Since generative frameworks can be so different from anything preceding them, it is not easy to figure out exactly what their analysis entails if you are not trained in their techniques and terminology.)

You have indicated elsewhere that you developed your analysis and terminology in the process of teaching English to non-native speakers. I am curious how your students would conceptually process "I bought the shirt that fitted best" and "I bought the shirt that fitted" as featuring two different types of component. Surely it would be confusing to be told that one involves a "phrase" whereas the other involves a "word", given that both are sentential predicates (to use the old terminology) for "the shirt". For the content of the relative clause (to again use the old terminology) to change categories, from "phrase" to "word", merely through the addition of an adverb in the relative clause, would seem to me to be a confusing way of teaching grammar to ESL students. Bathrobe (talk) 19:13, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

I won't pretend I can accurately recall the names associated with the linguistic cliques that correspond to the various manners of analyses I've read on this topic. My main concern is whether the analyses hold up to rigorous consideration. First, to rephrase some of the relative pronoun tenets implicit in your post:

1. In traditional schools of thought, a relative pronoun is supposed to be the subject of a relative clause. E.g. the "that" in "I smell the bread that you are baking" relates to the same "that" as the subject in Old and Early Modern English phrased as "That you are baking bread I smell."

2. The earliest and current understanding is "that" pronominally relates to "bread". Hence, "that" is a relative pronoun.

3. The "that" in ""I smell the bread that you are baking" is in apposition to "bread" in "I smell the bread that you are baking, and is parenthetical in "I smell the bread, which you are baking."

None of my students learned the term "relativizer" from me. Those who were aware of the term learned it outside the lessons taught at the language institute where I worked. Student who knew of it, however, were quick to ask whether "that" was an RP (and part of an RC) in the manner we were required to teach it, or whether it was a conjunction independent of an RC, as you pointed out in your post.

My institute's language manager of instruction forbade the instructors from teaching that "that" was a conjunction not just because it conflicted with his traditional view of grammar but moreover because it conflicted with the textbook materials we were contractually required to sell to the students. To my mind, the "that" in question is more properly construed to be a conjunction. My linguistic sense in that regard developed from what I learned of Spanish and Greek, yet it was confirmed by my interaction with Korean students.

A clarification: I had long, long ago questioned whether the Spanish word "que" (translated as "that" or "which" and sometimes "who" depending on the context) was construed by native Spanish speakers as a conjuction or as a relative pronoun. I only knew that my native English-speaking Spanish teacher ID'd "que" as a conjunction and the inflected "qué" (translated as "that", "which" "what" or "who(m) depending on the context) as a pronoun. So, "You know what I mean" or "Is that true?" uses qué; "the guy that I met" or "the movie which I saw" uses que. Additionally, in the Spanish subjunctive tense, I regularly got corrected when I spelled it with the pronoun que rather than the conjunction qué(described in Wikipedia as a complementizer) in a sentence like "I suggest that we arrive early".

____

I didn't teach ESL students in the manner you suggested. I intended to differentiate, for your sake, how my students were able to distinguish on their own (and regularly mock) the lack of coherence re what they knew to be a bona fide relative clause (i.e., a lexical item comprised of a subject and a finite verb in the manner of "I bought the shirt [RP-that] I thought fit best) versus what they decried as a psuedo relative clause involving either a verb phrase (i.e., two or more words comprising a lexical item other than a clause in the manner of "I bought the shirt "[RP-that] fit best") versus a mere word in the manner of "I bought the shirt "[RELZ-that] fit". They were the ones who tasked me to explain the terminological inconsistency.

I didn't. I couldn't. I can't. Yet, whispering in a manner that my manager of instruction couldn't overhear, I tell my students, "consider that to be a conjunction, and everything that follows it functions as adjectivally whether it's a clause, a verb phrase or just a word". That explanation satisfied the students' curiosity. Perhaps you're not aware that Sino-Asian curriculum, from grades 6-12, requires English grammar proficiency that far surpasses student exposure in all of the native English countries in my experience. Sadly, those students are required to pass standardardized tests that focus on grammatical skills, not semantic or conversational proficiency.

In South Korea, my students were professional adults whose English ability, prior to attending my institute, was mostly limited to what that they had acquired in middle and high school curricula geared toward TEPS, TOEFL, and TOEIC (see Test of English Proficiency (South Korea)), which excluded speaking. Those students arrived at our language institute embarrassed that they knew grammar frontwards & backwards but could barely converse intelligently with their global counterparts. They were supposed to focus on conversational English at our institute, but students couldn't help asking questions like:

• I understand how "the pen that writes well" is a relative clause if "that" is a pronnoun, but how can "the pen that writes well be a relative clause if "that" is a relativizer, since "writes well" isn't a clause?
• Why do you call "I was studying last night" a present participle when there's nothing present involved?
• Why do you call "is" a main verb in "I am thinking?" Isn't it the only verb? Isn't "thinking" a participle?
• Why is "This is weird" called a subject complement? Doesn't "weird" complement the stative verb, "is"?
• Why does the dictionary say "surprised" is an adjective but "I was surprised by the news" is supposed to be passive voice with surprised as a past participle?
• Another teacher said "come over to my house" has the same meaning as "come to my house". If that's true, why do some people say "come over"? Can I say "visit over my house?"
• In school, we learned "who" is the subjective case and "whom" is the objective case. Is that true? When I watch movies in English, nobody says "whom". Like, they say "it depends on who you know."

Kent Dominic·(talk) 05:41, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

Very interesting reminiscence.

My own background was 1) learning German briefly from a German native then at high school, 2) later also learning French at high school. I frankly can't remember how I was taught but the similarities to English of these languages made them and their grammar fairly easy to relate to. At the start, German cases were a stumbling block but not a serious one (when you are young it's easy to learn things). 3) At university I learnt Japanese, with a strong component being the audiolingual method (language lab). Language lab work is boring but instils the patterns into you without getting hung up on grammar. I still swear by the audiolingual method but unfortunately it's gone out of fashion because Chomsky demolished its theoretical underpinnings (behavioural reinforcement) with his concept of an innate language learning device in the brain. The beauty of audiolingual is that the patterns you internalise can be applied unreflectingly without always having to think of "grammar". 4) I also learnt linguistics, with syntax taught by Rodney Huddleston, who taught beautifully and logically. He taught Transformational grammar but was not a dyed-in-the-wool generative grammarian (as you can tell from the Cambridge Grammar). Linguistics helped me put what I learnt in order.

In Japan I became well acquainted with the situation you describe, i.e., heavy dependence on the grammar method in learning a foreign language. I myself never saw grammar as a problem because I can usually explain things in grammatical terms (at least, general grammar, not esoteric linguistics) without much trouble.

I taught English in Japan. I don't know if I was a good teacher. I do know that I found conversation textbooks that were organised according to grammar, without using too much technical terminology, easy to teach. In other words, the issue was always how to bring grammar alive in a way that students could use it themselves. A lot of this leans on sentence/pattern practice, not deploying grammatical terminology.

When I learnt Chinese I found it somewhat difficult since the audiolingual method was no longer the mainstream method. One was expected to pick the language up somehow without well-structured teaching. I also disliked the Chinese grammar I learnt, which was heavily structuralist (Chinese grammar as taught in China has its roots in the structuralist era).

Learning Mongolian much later in life was much harder because I no longer had the plasticity and ability to memorise that allowed me to learn languages easily when I was younger. And the teaching relied on neither "grammar" nor "pattern practice". Just plain old teachers working to teach you the language. Fortunately I met the late Dr Tserenpil, who had written a learner-oriented grammar of Mongolian. It helped me understand how Mongolian worked, although it didn't help drum it in. I still find Dr Tserenpil's terminological innovations confusing. Old-style, traditionally-based grammatical terms (although not necessarily those of Latin-based Western grammar) are still the easiest to relate to.

To sum up: The audiolingual method is boring but an excellent way of imprinting patterns on the brain. Grammar is very useful but doesn't actually teach you a language. Language teaching must find a way to teach students by somehow getting them to transition from their indoctrination in traditional grammar to actually learning the language. Bathrobe (talk) 10:40, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

Also interesting.

Let's return to the substance of the article to provide some relief to anyone who's weary of my long rants, digressions, etc.

In my view, the article should point out that the following sentences are semantically equivalent despite their differences in syntactic ccomposition and grammatical analysis:

1. The guy (zero RP) I told you about last week (RC) has died.
2. The guy that (RP) I told you about last week (RC) has died.
3. The guy who (RP) I told you about last week (RC) has died.
4. The guy, who (RP) I told you about last week, (RC) has died.
5. The guy whom (RP) I told you about last week (RC) has died.
6. The guy, whom (RP) I told you about last week, (RC) has died.
7. The guy (zero RELZ) I told you about last week has died.
8. The guy that (RELZ) I told you about last week (RC) has died.
9. The guy who (RELZ) I told you about last week (RC) has died.
10. The guy whom (RELZ) I told you about last week (RC) has died.
11. The guy about whom (PREP OBJ) I told you about last week has stopped bothering me.

Please say how you might I'd parse the #11 "I told you about last week" clause before you read my analysis that follows. When you're done, consider my take on it: I deem it a prepositional object complement whose SUP (PREP + OBJ COMPL) includes a definition for "object complement" that's significantly more expansive than the Wikipedia definition for object complement.

My bugaboo: I maintain sentences like the following don't comprise an RC (despite how this article cites Paul Schachter for the premise that, "In linguistics, a relativizer (abbreviated relz) is a type of conjunction that introduces a relative clause): "The guy who (RELZ) died is the guy I told you about last week." Fortunately, this article doesn't provide any such examples. Can't say the same for other sources I've read.

A lingering question that remains re this article (but decidedly not a matter of personal interest because relativizer is nowhere expounded in my lexicon): is relativizer often treated broadly as a term that also functions as a so-called complementizer as well as as a word that conjoins a dependent clause adjunctively characterizing an adjective (e.g., "so funny that I forgot to laugh") or adverbs (e.g., "spoke so quietly that no one could hear her"), participles, etc. Beats me. In my book, the just-mentioned "that" is an adverbial conjunction.

No post of mine would be complete without a rant of some sort, so here goes a rant against my own neglect: five years ago I edited the Wikipedia article on adverbs by exapnding the list of lexical items that may be modified by an adverb to include determiners. I neglected to add conjunctions as well. In my view, "spoke so quietly that no one could hear her" is semantically worlds apart from "spoke quietly so that no one could hear her". Kent Dominic·(talk) 15:11, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

Did you really mean this?

• The guy about whom I told you about last week has stopped bothering me.

Or was it just a copying/typing error? Bathrobe (talk) 15:59, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

Any preternaturally astute Korean student could demolish your analysis by pointing out:

1. "Sir, why do you talk of 'relative pronouns' (I know you wouldn't actually use this term) correlating with clauses, phrases, or mere words? Surely you could simplify it by referring to 'sentences', which would handily encompass them all.

2. "And sir, it seems clear to me that 'shirt' must be understood as the subject of the (so-called) relative clause. After all, since 'the shirt' is singular, the verb in the relative clause is 'fits'. If 'shirts' were in the plural ('the shirts'), it would be 'the shirts that fit'." So the fact that the verb form reflects the number of the head proves that the head is the subject of the relative clause.

I doubt that you have any Korean students who would pipe up like that, but if they did, how would you respond without tying yourself in knots? Bathrobe (talk) 01:02, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

Question #1: Asked and answered above.

Question #2: "bought the shirt that fit [Am. past simple tense of fit is fit] best".

Most of my students preferred discussing grammar – a topic in which they were well-versed – to vagaries of conversational English, which they found to be maddening to the Nth degree. Their tendency to compose their thoughts in their native language, and then to rapidly translate the result into English according to grammar rules memorized by rote, seldom worked well. It led to students reflexively saying, e.g., upon an initial introduction, "Good morning. My name is Lee Tae Sung. Nice to meet you. What is your age?" (Their thinking: In the Korean language, relative seniority determines what pronouns and verb inflections to use in addressing others. We don't have such conventions much less any such case markings in English, so asking a stranger's age is non-relevant and typically considered rude.) Kent Dominic·(talk) 06:03, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

Ouhallian analysis

At the section on the Ouhallian analysis, it is indicated that "C-Type Relativizers can introduce a relative clause as an argument of a noun phrase, or they can introduce a relative clause as an argument of a verb phrase." Just in case you don't follow that particular school of grammatical jargon, as an example of a relative clause as an argument of a verb phrase they produce the sentence "Laila told us [that the actors are on strike]".

The authors are perfectly entitled to adopt this analysis if it is supported in the linguistic literature. However, it would be useful to indicate that "that the actors are on strike" as used in this sentence is not regarded as a relative clause in most theories of grammar, including the Wikipedia article on "Relative clause". It would, in fact, be regarded as a content clause (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_clause), also known as a noun clause. This rather radical departure from conventional grammatical theory should be justified, or at least flagged, in the article. (Indeed, the fact that "Arabic uses two phonologically distinct morphemes to account for these syntactic phenomena" presents a prima facie case for not treating "that the actors are on strike" as a relative clause.)

Either way, this paragraph is poorly integrated into the article (given that a relativizer is initially defined as "a type of conjunction that introduces a relative clause" and actually links to the entry for "relative clause"), conflicts with what is found at related pages on Wikipedia, and is extremely confusing for all but the most diehard follower of grammatical theory.

Bathrobe (talk) 00:49, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

Hole in the article

The current lede says, "In linguistics, a relativizer (abbreviated rel) is a type of conjunction that introduces a relative clause." The linked article on relative clause says, "A relative clause is a clause that modifies a noun or noun phrase and uses some grammatical device to indicate that one of the arguments in the relative clause refers to the noun or noun phrase." Accordingly, all of the examples in the Relativizer article include clauses conjoined to a noun or noun phrase. There's no mention (1) in this article, (2) in the relative clause article, or (3) in the conjunction article concerning how the word that may conjoin an adjective or participle together with an adverbial clause, e.g.:

• I'm hopeful that you'll agree.
• Be aware that it might rain.
• The kids are scared that a boggey man was in the basement.
• You're supprised that I can write such a short post?

Kent Dominic·(talk) 16:22, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

I totally agree. That is why I have been pointing out, both at my comment on "Ouhallian analysis" and at "Restrictive and nonrestrictive", how poorly integrated this entry is with the rest of Wikipedia and also internally. This betrays the nature of the entry as a stand-alone school project. A bunch of students have been given the go-ahead to do some kind of comprehensive "go-to" explanation of relativisers within a generative framework without any grounding in the larger issues. And in some places they've got it spectacularly wrong thanks to their lack of knowledge.

As I thought I had also pointed out (but, it seems didn't clearly cover), "that" also functions as a complementiser in generative grammar (which is the usage shown in the examples you give), and the clause in question is classed as a complement clause. This has been discussed by linguists, but the upshot is that there is a proliferation of terminology to describe what most people instinctively understand about grammar but can't put into words. Bathrobe (talk) 19:29, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

I can think of three separate uses of "that" introducing clause-level components:

The dog that he left me. (Relative clause -- modifies "dog")

The fact that he left me. (Content clause -- indicates the content of "the fact")

I know that he left me. (Complement clause or noun clause -- functions as a noun, the object the verb "know")

In the article on Content clause, 2 and 3 (the content clause and the noun clause) are both treated as the same kind of construction, i.e., content clause.

I, too, feel a little confused by this treatment. I would need to check with the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language and several other grammars to clarify how they treat it. As I mentioned above, revising the article would involve quite a lot of checking back and forth among different sources in order to achieve some kind of harmonisation. (Complete harmonisation might be impossible anyway, given the various treatments that are found in the literature.) Bathrobe (talk) 19:54, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

If it means anything, you are not alone in your rejection of the traditional analysis. For instance, L'ellipse et les relatives by Jacqueline Bastuji from 1983:

The paper discusses the analysis of ellipsis in relative clauses and rejects the traditional idea of a relation between an antecedent and the relative clause. The paper suggests that relativization is the adjunction of a property to an N or NP.

It might or might not float your boat, but unfortunately it's long, it's in French, and I'm not sure whether it's arguing just against the twerps or the neo-twerps as well. Bathrobe (talk) 19:31, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

IMHO, there's nothing novel about the linguistic concept of conjoining an adjectival clause, adjectival phrase, or adjectival word to an N or NP via conjunction or ellipses. It's that the English language terminology for analysing the pertinent grammar is woeful. I wish I could read French to see what Jacqueline Bastuji had to say on the topic, but I can only imagine it was much of the same that we've discussed here. Kent Dominic·(talk) 04:35, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

I've run the paper through OCR and subjected it to Google Translate. It's difficult to understand, partly because of terminology and underlying concepts.

She deals with the phenomenon of ellipsis, which is analysed as "a lack" (something left out), and "supplementation of the lack". She uses examples from Persian, Chinese, and Turkish to argue against the concept of "ellipsis of an antecedent". In the course of this she pokes some fun at Chomskyan linguistics.

3. The relative in Indo-European languages.

This includes an antecedent Noun or Noun phrase, followed by a so-called “relative” clause which includes a subordination marker of the form K-fKW-fQU- and a pronominal representation of the antecedent. It is this marker of subordination that Chomskyan grammar analyzed as a Complementizer endowed with remarkable properties. The COMP and pronominal anaphora are ordinarily merged into a single word necessarily placed at the head of the clause, according to a movement transformation that is identical for both relativization and question formation.

(I'm not sure what version of Chomskyan linguistics she's referring to. I gather that at some stage the relative pronouns were analysed as Complementisers.)

She then discusses Persian ke. For example:

yek bite vâred sod ke man u-râ na-misanaxtam (-râ: accusative)

“A man came in that I didn’t know him”

Yek cah-i hast ke hâlâ ân câh xarâb-ast,

literally “there is a well that today this well is out of use”;

In the second example, the entire antecedent is reproduced in the "relative clause", so ke has no pronominal function, and ellipsis plays no role.

With regard to the concept of antecedent (element coming before), she turns to Chinese.

mai shu-de xuesheng (Rygafoff, Elementary Grammar of Chinese, 191-93)

“buy book (+student”)

= “the student(s) who buy(s) a book(s)”

It would seem stupid to us to find ellipsis there.

Her argument seems to be that you can't talk of ellipsis when the "relative clause" precedes the "antecedent".

At any rate, while she makes good points, her piece seems to me to be proceeding from a somewhat narrow perspective that is fixated on traditional concepts of "ellipsis" and "antecedent" and does not take into account later typological work. It was an interesting excursus but gave me the impression that she was sputtering in indignation at new-fangled concepts. (She was more than ten years older than Chomsky, after all.) Bathrobe (talk) 20:24, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

A complementizer is a relativizer is a relative pronoun is one of three in that series of terms I refuse to use because (1) izer-ing things sounds ridiculous to my ear in this context, (2) relative pronoun-izing what should be a conjunction seems ridiculous-izing the matter, and (3) the legit concepts underlying a complementizer, a relativizer, and a relative pronoun don't absolve the shortcomings apparent in how those three terms have been variously defined, characterized, and applied in particular instances of grammatical analyses.

I'm nearly 100% sure that by Bastuji's "It would seem stupid to us to find ellipsis" re "the student(s) who buy(s) a book(s)" identifies the failing evident in what I distinguish as a so-called relative clause (e.g., the student [who] you saw buy a book, where "who" may be elided) versus what nobody except fellow rebels and iconoclasts contrasts as a *ahem* relative verb phrase (e.g., the student who buys a book, where "who" can't be cogently elided without altering the intended meaning).

My options: (1) make pertinent edits to this article and get assailed for ignoring the website's policy proscribing original research no matter how well-reasoned the edits might be, (2) rant to the wind or sing to the talk page choirs regarding the shortcomings of the complementizer C, relativizer R, and relative clause RC vernacular as characterized in sources cited in those respective articles here, or (3) create my own (yet-unpublished) work that stands on the shoulders of literature re C, R and RC within a paradigm that sorts out all of the above.

I spend most of my time working to complete (3). Some editors would say I spend too much time doing (2). Ocassionally I get caught when I sneak in a bit of (1), in which case I have to plead guilty as acccused but frustrated by the sad state of what remains upon reversion. I'll be interested to see if editors here eventually pick up on my work after its publication. If so, they'd be well advised to cite the terms here – terms that I strived to make self-evident to anyone who shuns convoluted, English-language linguistic terms and favors terms premised on basic parts of speech and vocaublary that translates more readily worldwide:

• an adjectival conjunction conjoins a noun or pronoun and (1) an adjunctive clause: "I like the apricots [that] you bought"; "This is the place [where] we first met", or (2) a phrase: "I prefer the cashews that are roasted"; or (3) a word: "I saw the accident that happened"; "I rant to anyone who listens (where only an adjectival clause requires a conjunction and where which may be substituted for that, but the objective case whom may NOT be substituted for the conjunction who.

• a nominal conjunction conjoins (1) a transitive verb and a clausal complement: "I believe [that] you are correct, (2) an intransitive verb and a stative object (NOTE: My dissatisfaction with the conceptual underpinnings of a subject complement is a separate matter): "The problem is [that] few people seem determined to reconcile the anomalies in these matters]]
• an adverbial conjunction conjoins a clause, a phrase, an adjective, or an adverb and –

(1) a clause: "They rioted until the police came"; "Please be aware [that] we made some changes"; "It happened so fast [that] no one saw it"; "Now ''that'' you're here, we can begin"

(2) a phrase: "I agree but only somewhat"; "They moved quickly and very quietly"; "It's used although not heavily

(3) a word: It's happening slowly but surely

Yep, I stopped using outmoded terms like subordinate clause or main clause long before dependent clause and independent clause became the vogue thanks to ESL students who asked, e.g., "In the complex sentence, 'I think that gravity may not necessarily be the weakest of the four fundamental interactions upon a reconsideration of the Theory of Everything,' how does 'I think' (i.e., a declarative clause) rate as the main clause while the rest (i.e., a propositional clause rates as subordinate?"

My takeaway: modern linguistic terms should reflect modern-day realities of plain language inferences rather than reliance on technical senses limited to linguistic jargon. If I'm maligned for doing the same thing^{[conditional clause (grammar)]}, I'll consider going back to the drawing board^{[propositional clause]}.

Meanwhile, I pity those who guess a relativizer is a grandma or grandpa and that a complementizer is a toady who tries to get on someone's good side via flattery of a boss, a celebrity, or a relativizer, etc. Kent Dominic·(talk) 04:29, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

I wish you hadn't linked to subject complement. It was so confusing that I couldn't help being bold and rewriting it. (I didn't add any extra material or dispute the analysis, but it was organised so poorly that it sent my head spinning). Bathrobe (talk) 17:43, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

But, you didn't edit the object complement article to point out how it neglects to say why only a so-called direct object is the only object entitled to have an object complement. Why didn't you point out how a prepositional phrase that complements a prepositional object (e.g., "off the top of my head) is unfairly excluded from membership in the object complement club?" Why didn't you say how "I saw the edit that you made" is a transitive object complement (i.e., re the transitive object "edit") that's suffered generations of undue discrimination from inclusion in the object complement clan and has been relegated to clown class status as a relative clause?

I know why: you know the futility of putting Lipstick on a pig. Kent Dominic·(talk) 19:22, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

I would not even try to start rewriting these entries in the way you have suggested. In this case, I agree with Doric Loon: the entry should state the consensus in traditional grammar, such as there is, and make clear that it has been written within that framework. I know you laugh at traditional grammar, but it does need to be mentioned as it is the kind of grammar that most people with a passing interest are familiar with.

One problem with linguistic articles on W'pedia is that each segment of the, er... profession, tends to push its own approach. Since Chomskyan-style grammar has become the mainstream in many parts of academic linguistics, the result is articles incomprehensible to the outsider, like this one on "Relativizer". To be truly encyclopaedic, all linguistic entries would need to be written in a way that different frameworks are represented in the entry, or the framework adopted should at least be made clear in the lede. But that might be even more confusing. Bathrobe (talk) 22:55, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

Have you read this? "Modern and traditional descriptive approaches": http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/ModTradDescr.pdf

It grapples with some of the issues you raise, but rather than throwing out the whole kit and caboodle, it updates "traditional grammar" with structuralist and transformationalist findings and approaches. (You'll probably reject it but the reasoning behind their choices is interesting. I'm pretty sure Pullum is responsible for the attacking tone. Huddleston is much more circumspect.) Bathrobe (talk) 21:09, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

The "history" section

The new history section that was added recently contains unsupported, sloppy editing.

The entry originally stated:

"Since as far back as 1712, people have written about relativizers and what functions they have. They have been classified as conjunctions in earlier times, and have later been referred to as clause markers. They are known today as relativizers. Despite an agreement in nomenclature, there are multiple analyses which attempt to account for the grammatical function and distribution of relativizers."

There was a single reference to Ralph Long's 1961 book The Sentence and its Parts as a source for the statement that they were later called "clause markers".

The new History section added the following spurious information:

1. "Until the early 19th century, such lexical items were generally referred to as clause markers".

• No, it was Long's 1961 book that referred to them as "clause markers".

2. "In the mid-19th century, clause markers became known as relative pronouns."

• There is no source given for this assertion. As discussed at User: Doric Loon's talk page, the term "relative pronoun" well predates the mid-19th century.

3. Beginning in 1938, relativizer emerged a term that now competes with relative pronoun.

• No source given. Sloppy edit with no historical perspective. Did "relativizer" compete with "relative pronoun". Or did it emerge in order to supplement the term "relative pronoun"?

4. Despite that contrasting nomenclature and notwithstanding their disparate lexical categories, relativizers and relative pronouns perform the same function by way of introducing a relative clause.

• This statement is hard to support as it stands and appears to represent the editor's POV, or the editor's interpretation of the later content of the article. "Relativizer" and "relative pronoun" are not necessarily the same, since "that" can be regarded as a relativizer without being a relative pronoun.

I originally attempted to revert or question individual parts of the History section. When I realised that most of the most poorly supported statements in the section, which still cited Long 1961 as a source (!), were due to the later editor, not the original authors, it was too late. I had to painstakingly try to reconstruct the original content since a simple revert would no longer work. Bathrobe (talk) 19:59, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

I've just restored a reconsituted section on the history. I hope I've fixed the shortcomings that carried over from the article's prior text and spilled into the first version of the history section. Comment here or apply a further fix if you spot anything dodgy. Kent Dominic·(talk) 08:36, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

@Bathrobe You said elsewhere that you think "Relativizers have been classified as conjunctions in earlier times..." without indicating the time period involved. As far as I know, relativizers, as ID'd by that term, have always been considered to be conjunctions since the term was coined in 1938. If you can cite evidence that the term relativizer existed before 1938 and was then considered a conjunction, please post that evidence here. Depending on what you produce, it might support the possibility of merging this article and the relative pronoun article. Kent Dominic·(talk) 08:54, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

The article itself originally said "They have been classified as conjunctions in earlier times". I'm not aware of where I myself might have made such a statement. Bathrobe (talk) 19:14, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

You said it here as a cut & paste job. Granted, you didn't originate the statement, but the edit has your name by it. 😜

Regardless, I 100% agree with the statement, uncited or not. I concluded awhile ago, via circumstantial but not direct evidence, that clause markers no matter their flavor – including relativzers, complementizers, and relative pronouns – must have been construed as conjunctions long before the "relative pronoun" coinage made a mess of things. I didn't reach that conclusion without wondering if I was a wacko for coming to see "relative pronoun" as a conjunction despite my lifelong indoctrination to the contrary, or if it was just an impossible task to finger the wacky one who first made the terminological bait and switch.

On a personal note, take this for what it's worth: despite my instigation to the contraty on these talk pages, my own work doesn't disparage those three terms at all. My lexicon has merely one entry for each, a gloss re its presumptive date of coinage, and a Cf. link to terms that take what I consider a more integrated linguistic approach. Implicit in the glossed dates of coinage is that (1) the terms emerged when linguistic theory was in its nascent stages, and (2) modern thinking has surpassed much of what's been taken for granted without due reconsideration ever since.

Accordingly, the inference becomes: the older the terminology, the less salient it might be given how modern syntax, grammatical standards, and vocabulary are ever-evolving. So I'm really quite grateful that you spotted my "19th century" snafu that should have been 18th century, i.e., the earlier the better my point of inference becomes. As mentioned, my need to revisit "relative clause" in my lexicon has been nil. However...

After editing it to reflect the correct century, I looked at my lexicon's entry for "relative pronoun". Oops. There, too, it was off only by 100 years. Cut & paste is a blessing and sometimes a curse. Kent Dominic·(talk) 20:16, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

In the History section it is stated that:

• "Beginning in 1938, relativizer emerged as a term that now competes with relative pronoun."

Later it is stated that:

• relativizers and relative pronouns essentially perform the same function by way of introducing a relative clause.

Taken together, these convey the misleading impression that the terms "relativiser" and "relative pronoun" are somehow interchangeable.

In fact, it has been disputed that "that" is a relative pronoun. That is, while both "relativisers" and "relative pronouns" introduce relative clauses, "that" does not refer to an antecedent and is therefore not a pronoun. From this point of view, the term "relativiser" doesn't actually compete with "relative pronoun"; it is an overarching category that includes both relative pronouns (pronominal) and "that" (not pronominal). See Van der Auwera's Relative that - a centennial dispute (https://www.academia.edu/51056100/Relative_that_a_centennial_dispute) for a discussion of this issue. If anything, his article only goes to show how grammarians and linguists can get themselves tied up over issues like this. (Note that Van der Auwera comes down on the side of "that" as a highly pronominal relativiser.)

Both of the statements above need to be amended to remove the impression that "relativiser" necessarily = "relative pronoun". Bathrobe (talk) 16:07, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

I'm responsible for editing the article to say (1) relativizer is a term that now competes with relative pronoun, and (2) relativizers and relative pronouns essentially perform the same functions. I disagree those two statements are interchangeable precisely because I dispute how that, which, and who may properly be construed to be pronouns. My wording for the article was a concession to what it replaced, namely, the "In linguistics, a relativizer (abbreviated rel) is a type of conjunction that introduces a relative clause" verbiage that had been there before. Such an assertion is deceptively narrow. That's why I deleted it and ID'd the respective terms as comprehending disparate lexical categories and characterized them with the qualification that they perform essentially the same functions.

To the extent you find it better to cite Van der Auwera as a source for the premise that relativizer is a hypernym that includes relative pronoun (traditionally construed) as a hyponym, that'd be great. Apparently, Van der Auwera would agree with my Hole in the article posts. Beware, however, that the entire Wiki article treats the two terms as performing essentially the same functions.

I don't intend to read the Van der Auwer stuff to see if it treats relativiser as a conjunction broadly in a manner that includes characterizing a participle ("so tired that..." or "so interesting that..."), an adjective ("be aware that..." "entirely right that...") or one that functions as a so-called complementizer ("I think that..." or "They insist that...). I merely edited the article in the flawed state that I found it. It remains flawed far beyond the reasons you just pointed out. Kent Dominic·(talk) 21:38, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

Beware, however, that the entire Wiki article treats the two terms as performing essentially the same functions.

In the sense that they both introduce relative clauses they do perform the same function. That is not a reason to interpolate your personal view that they "compete", since it is clear from the sources I cited that researchers do distinguish between the two. They are not synonyms.

Van der Auwera is actually quite concrete in his article. He does not waffle and refers to existing analyses by earlier grammarians in order to refute them point by point. If you actually read him you might vehemently disagree with him or find his statements relatively acceptable. But he is not airy-fairy and might not send your brain spinning in the way that you expect. Tant pis. Bathrobe (talk) 22:14, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

I urge you to avoid interpreting anything I've posted in the article as reflecting a personal point of view any sort. That the two terms "compete" is a just a turn of phrase relating to their respective frequency of usage, as the Google Ngram cites amply demonstrate. To state my personal point in the article, i.e., not that they compete but they're seemingly conflated by the article taken as whole, isn't encyclopediacally proper, would it? If you believe, contrary to what I think, others might infer a synonymous relation based on a reading of "Despite [the] contrasting nomenclature and notwithstanding their disparate lexical categories, relativizers and relative pronouns essentially perform the same function by way of introducing a relative clause" (emphasis added), there's not much more I can say except the qualification is quite evident to my way of thinking.

That qualification obviously isn't extended in a run-on sentence to say:

"...perform the same function by way of introducing a relative clause, but differ in extraordinary other ways that, for some inexplicable reason, aren't detailed in this article yet are mentioned in the Hole in the article thread on this article's talk page, where an editor with the Bathrobe handle has expressed interest to emend the article in this regard but so far hasn't taken the initiative to do so, and as an editor named Kent Dominic has expressed a lack of inspiration to pursue since, as an unfavorable critic of both of these verbis ut terminology, the resulting edits would would run afoul of the Wiki guidance that proscribes original research."

Kent Dominic·(talk) 00:02, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

the two terms "compete" is a just a turn of phrase relating to their respective frequency of usage,

You think it's an innocuous turn of phrase; I do not, as I've tried to point out, unsuccessfully, it seems. Using "compete" betrays a fairly cavalier attitude to established terminology, which, I'm afraid, looks like a product of your own professed contempt for said terminology. Bathrobe (talk) 03:05, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

Let me elaborate on why I think your formulation is biased.

1. You claim that you are simply pointing out the rising frequency of "relativiser" vis-à-vis "relative pronoun" in grammatical usage. Your basis for reaching this conclusion is ngrams -- which you have not cited as a source for your edit. Your use of the term "compete" as an interpretation of the uncited ngrams implies a straight competition between two equivalent terms. You leave it to the reader to figure out why the term relativiser is taking over from relative pronoun. And the term "compete" pretty much leads the reader to the conclusion that a new term is ousting an old term, nothing more.

2. But a problem then arises regarding the cause of the trend you point out. What if the rising frequency of "relativiser" was based not on some kind of "fashion" or "trend" in naming, leading to the decline of one of the two terms, but on developments in the actual analysis of relative clauses -- namely, that "relativiser" is a superordinate term that includes but does not refer exclusively to "relative pronouns"? Since you have consistently refused to consult sources which might bear out such an analysis (because you are not interested in them for reasons related to your own theorising -- hence your rant), the current formulation is a direct expression of your own views. Which I would humbly suggest is that one undesirable term ("relative pronoun") is being ousted by an equally or even more objectionable new one, ("relativiser").

That is why I consider your formulation at the article to be influenced by your own bias, despite your veiled appeal to some kind of objectivity. Bathrobe (talk) 05:48, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

With all due respect, I haven't read, nor do I intend to read your post beyond "Let me elaborate on why I think your formulation is biased." If you perceive an article shortcoming that stems from what you imagine to be my bias re whatever, count me out of any debate on the matter. Your thoughts re the presumed bias of a fellow editor don't interest me and, IMO, are immaterial to the sufficiency of the article. If you see a shortcoming that you feel inspired to edit in the article, then edit it. Kent Dominic·(talk) 13:40, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

You ARE biased. But I'll edit the article since you are impervious to any reasoning. Bathrobe (talk) 15:59, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

I'll think of how to edit it in my own sweet time, btw. Finding a workaround for biased narratives is time-consuming. Life is short. Bathrobe (talk) 16:31, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

@Bathrobe: You would do well to consider WP:NOPA –

Cheers, and good luck in all of your endeavors. Kent Dominic·(talk) 19:52, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

Yes, it was an ad hominem and I regret it. My attempt to demonstrate that one of your edits was the result of an extreme, self-professed aversion to the term "relative" in traditional grammar (as demonstrated by your numerous rants) devolved into this unfortunate rejoinder. I apologise that, in the heat of the moment, I made a straight-out personal attack on you but the damage is done.

It has been fascinating, although at times bewildering, to watch you unfold your ideas. I am still intrigued to see the final fruits of your assault on traditional grammatical terminology and analyses but I guess I never will. I can understand your exasperation with both (especially terminology) but I honestly have doubts that your proposed makeover will work. At any rate, any comment or input on my part will be obviously be inappropriate in future.

I also wish you good luck in your endeavours. Bathrobe (talk) 21:39, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

I hope what follows might help you to consider whether and, if so, how to edit the article's "compete with" phrasing....

From Merriam-Webster:

compete

intransitive verb

to strive consciously or unconsciously for an objective (such as position, profit, or a prize) : be in a state of rivalry

From TLS (i.e., the initials of my lexicon):

compete

intransitive verb – to contend, struggle, or battle for an objective against an opponent

Under either defintion, it stands to reason that "relativizer emerged as a term that now competes with relative pronoun" is a turn of phrase, since neither term has a mind with which to compete in a literal sense. I'd agree 100% that the quoted text may be rightly assailed as unencyclopediac language style, but I think reasonable people would agree that a hypallage indicating competition between two terms in no way suggests that they're somehow synonymous.

I'm not one to sit and marvel at my writing, least of all a mere first or second draft. My editing here is always targeted to readers and editors alike, and there's a necessary bit of balancing that occurs when weighing what certain editors submit versus what we assume about the range of other Wiki readers.

There are infinte ways to characterize the "compete with" turn of phrase. E.g.:

(1) diverges from

(2) reflects concepts that expand on those traditionally associated with

(3) represents a broader set of grammatical analysis that subsumes what has been comprehended by

I'd vote for #1 because my semantic sense tells me that no two terms are synonymous. I don't have independent evidence that #2 and #3 are true since those statements are based mostly on what I've read at Wikipedia, and Wikipedia itself is not a reliable source.

My bias against the term, relativizer, isn't likely to abate regardless of whether independently cited sources define it in ways that seem unobjectionale. Indeed, I first came across the term by virtue of upon reading this Wikipedia article, and my initial reaction was, "Ah, someone apparently agrees with me that a relative pronoun is a misnomer and that its function is more properly construed as a conjunction. Cool, if I'm a linguistic lunatic or grammatical outlaw, at least I'll have company at the asylum or in the stocks."

My second reaction was to pity those who uncritically read this gobbledy-gook of an article and to wish them well since it was obvious that the relativizer term piggybacked on the relative pabulum (which, in my opinion, has no cross-linguistic analog except those whose translations generate widespread mockery of how a relative-this-or-that – including RP, RC, RRC, NRRD and their DRC & NDRC cousins – is conceptually flawed despite the intentions of well-meaning traditionalists inured to traditional English grammar analyses).

I've neither a need nor interest in determining whatever published sources have to say about relativizer beyond what editors here have cited and what I incidently stumble across otherwise. My bias against the term is based solely on what I deem an unfortunate choice on the part of its coiner(s) whoe perpetuated the relative semantic pedigree.

I mean this in the kindest possible way: Please avoid going to the trouble of posting, for my benefit, published sources that assert whatever about concepts associated with the term, relativizer. (The same goes for relative anything, for that matter.) Instead, include the relevant assertion in an appropriate part of the article and accordingly cite it there. Please (1) consider it irrelevant whether I agree or disagree with the cited source, and (2) dismiss any inclination to conclude that any subsequent editing tweak that I might perform or suggest is based on anything other than the integrity of the article rather than on promoting a personal bias.

In all honesty, I have no idea whether Paul Schachter in 1985 actually said something such as "a relativizer (abbreviated relz) is a type of conjunction that introduces a relative clause." I take it on faith that he did. I have no evidence, no curiosity, and no interest whether such a statement is representative of most linguists or whether it's an outlier.

To satisfy your fascination and allay your bewilderment re my linguistic bias pertaining to relativizer, consider this: I'm certain that some unknown number of people who read my lexicon will wonder how their familiarity with relativizer squares with the terms that I use. Here's all they'll read of it in the TLS glossary:

relativizer

grammar – a 20th century taxon, invented in the late 1930s, intended to classify words that function as a conjunction in certain contexts.

Cf. –

• adjectival conjunction
• nominal conjunction

Note how cf. contrasts compare as a point of reference. I.e., a relativizer is decidedly synonynous with neither adjectival conjunction (which may conjoin an adjectival clause or an adjectival phrase to an antecedent object or subject) nor nominal conjunction (which is my preferred term for one that conjoins what Otto Jespersen presumably was the first to term as a content clause).

With that being the extent of my work's mention of relativizer, there's no disparagement of that term. I leave it to my readers to figure out, if they so choose, how to construe and apply whatever relativizer is supposed to denote. Yet, you know from all my ranting here why I don't like the term regardless of whatever means and how it's been characterized wherever. To refresh your memory just in case, I don't care for the term stylistically because of its -izer form, and I lament how it extends the relative semantics.

That latter reason only partially explains why my work doesn't link the term to any independent source. In the rare instance that my lexicon doesn't uniquely define a linguistic term but instead attributes a definition to a linked source, Wiki products don't qualify as sufficiently reliable IMHO. An exception: the Wikipedia article on morpheme meets my expectations, and Wiktionary definition of protasis is commendable in contrast to its Wikipedia counterpart, which limits protasis to the sense re drama and makes the reader jump through hoops to find it in conditional sentence, where there's an abundance of outmoded verbiage such as "main clause".

If it's true that a relativizer is a type of conjunction that (among other things) introduces a relative clause, I'm pleased that the examples here are limited to actual clauses. By contrast, I'm dismayed that the article on relative clause, as well as in casual grammatical analyses by and large, seem to not to differentiate an adjectival clause* (e.g., "The one that I want") from an adjectival verb phrase (e.g., "The one that got away".)

I suspect that somewhere, some linguistic throwback has characterized relativizer to mean any word that conjoins (1) a subordinate clause with an antecedent substantive including nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, and (2) a transitive verb together with a predicate. It would take a linguistics history nerd to construe it to mean any word conjoining (1) a dependent clause that characterizes an antecedent noun, pronoun, or adjective, and (2) a clause that functions as a transitive object to a transitive verb, participle, or gerund.

That should remind you of my overall knock not against what a relativizer may be cited to comprehend, but what this article neglects to say about it.

Cheers. Kent Dominic·(talk) 11:50, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for graciously continuing to elaborate on your reasoning after I lost it back there.

I am not aware of the original intent behind the coining of the term relativizer, sometime before 1938 according to Google ngrams, although the OED's earliest evidence for relativizer is from 1941, in the writing of B. Haile. (Google ngrams finds the first occurrence of the form relativiser in 1959, which suggests, but of course does not prove, that it took a while to cross the Atlantic.)

But it does appear that in current usage relativizer is understood as a more general term that subsumes relative pronouns, relative adverbs, and relative demonstratives (see "user230"'s explanation at https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/87179/relativizer-vs-relative-pronoun.) This suggests that, in current usage, at least, relativizer does not compete with relative pronoun; it complements it.

Biber et al's Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English (2006) also classifies relativizer as follows:

1) relative pronouns: who, whom, which, that

2) relative determiners: which, whose

3) relative adverbs: where, when, why

There are also "zero relativizers".

The relativizer's ugly cousin complementizer can be definitively attributed to Transformational Grammar in the early 1960s (I'm too lazy to track down the originator) as an overarching, abstract term for "that" as it is used in introducing "complements", along with other forms that are also considered to introduce "complements". For details see the article on Complementizer, which introduces the reader to this kind of thinking in loving detail.

Let me think how I would edit the article to reflect the above. Bathrobe (talk) 21:06, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

PS. The only reference that I could find to a work that might reasonably fit the description "B. Haile in 1941" is Learning Navaho, Volume One by Berard Haile. (Later edit) I am not knowledgeable about relative clauses in Navajo, but it appears that they are not relative pronouns at all. They are suffixes attached to the verb. They apply to the entire "relative clause", which precedes the "head" or "antecedent" (choose your favourite terminology). So it's possible that the term "relativizer", originally at least, had nothing to do with relative pronouns at all. Bathrobe (talk) 22:08, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

You stated above that:

• I concluded awhile ago ... that clause markers no matter their flavor – including relativzers, complementizers, and relative pronouns – must have been construed as conjunctions long before the "relative pronoun" coinage made a mess of things.

You sensibly added that you reached this conclusion via circumstantial but not direct evidence, but you also ventured the view that some "wacky one" -- you know not who -- perpetrated a "terminological bait and switch".

We have discussed the historical background elsewhere, at User: Doric Loon's talk page. It appears that while the two main Latin grammarians whose legacy lived on to later times, Donatus and Priscian, were divided over whether to call Latin "qui" a pronoun (Donatus) or noun (Priscian), they appear to have agreed that "qui" was relative in nature, i.e., it anaphorically referred to an antecedent. Later grammarians, in the Middle Ages and later, further developed the grammatical descriptions left by the Latin grammarians until "traditional grammar" arrived at its current formulation in about the 18th century.

As I mentioned at that page, there is a paper on this by Bernard Colombat entitled Le traitement de qui, qui(s), quod dans la tradition grammaticale latine : quelques jalons pour l'étude du relatif, de Donat à Port-Royal. I have unfortunately not yet got around to reading this paper, but I would certainly be very cautious about reaching conclusions like relativzers, complementizers, and relative pronouns ... must have been construed as conjunctions long before the "relative pronoun" coinage made a mess of things. (See again Van der Auwera's paper, which discusses relatively recent proposals to treat relative markers as conjunctions.) Bathrobe (talk) 21:00, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

A paper that might be dearer to your heart (because it was written by a Korean researcher) is The Unresolved Identity of that Relative Clauses (Kim 2013). This is more explicit about the implications of the terminological question of relativiser and relative pronoun. It can be downloaded from https://www.sciedu.ca/journal/index.php/elr/article/view/3723

Perhaps even more interesting is this paper on The Proform/Conjunction Interface: A Study of the Syntax of Relative 'That' by Thilo Weber (2009), which devotes an entire section to terminology: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354063176_The_ProformConj_Interface_A_Study_of_the_Syntax_of_Relative_That.pdf

Bathrobe (talk) 00:12, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

When people discover how much time and effort I’ve devoted to my lexicon, they first consider it a boast when I say I want to be the Michael Jordan of lexicography. I then explain how I don’t aspire to be the lexicographical GOAT. I merely mean that my approach to lexicography reflects MJ’s approach to basketball: a commitment to ever-improve my ability through indefatigable, quasi-obsessive, and unsurpassed practice, innovation, and refinement of practical skills through more practice.

MJ’s research via film study exceeds my research via linguistics study because I’m often distracted by the style of scholarly text, to the detriment of its substance. Instead, I’m by and large content to make my own linguistic inferences and only foray into scholarly texts to see if someone beat me to the punch re a linguistic term I think I’ve coined protologistically.

That being said, I long ago inferred, without solid evidence, that some linguistic progenitor coined the term relative pronoun during the transition from Middle English to Modern English, and I narrowed down the specific coinage only to somewhere between the late 16th century and very early 18th century. That’s the time period in which I found evidence of the English language shifting primarily from OSV to SVO. In other words, from phrasing such as “Breakfast I did eat this morning” to “I ate breakfast this morning”, including pronominal versions such as “That I had for the breakfast was porridge” to “The breakfast that I had was porridge.”

Imaginative logic took hold of me to hypothesize that, sometime between 1580 and 1711, the following discussion took place among rival linguistic progenitors:

Johnson: Today I asked my father, “Have you seen the play that William Shakespeare calls a masterful tragedy but is truly travesty of drama?” Dad pretended not to understand a word of the question.

Cartwright: Your old man’s not into the theater scene, eh?

Johnson: Nah, he’s just linguistically backwards and thinks we youth of today talk in such slang. So I rephrased the question the old-fashioned way: “Hast thou see’est that William Shakespeare a play he doth hail a masterful tragedy how-it-e’er verily be a travesty of drama?

Miller: Ha! Anyone who talks like that these days will soon and forever be considered relics. Or, I should say, “Who talks such presently they shall be anon and henceforth fossils reckn’d.”

Johnson: But seriously, what should we call the “that” in the “the play that…” or the “who” in the “Anyone who talks…”? We need a term that even fuddy-duddies like our parents can wrap their traditionalist heads around.

Miller: Yes, indeed: That even fuddy-duddies like our parents can wrap their traditionalist heads around a term we do need.

(Laughter)

Cartwright: Okay, listen up. The “that” in the “the play that…” or the “who” in the “anyone who talks…” phrasing are pronouns. Meaning, the pronominal “that” in “Hast thou see’est that William Shakespeare a play…” corresponds to the semantic referent “play”. Similarly, the “who” in “Who talks such presently” corresponds to the semantic referent “anyone”. Because of that correspondence, I think we should term our use of “that” and “who” in such cases as a corresponding pronoun.

Miller: Except, corresponding pronoun sounds too technical. As I see it, the “that” in “Hast thou see’est that William Shakespeare a play…” is a pronoun relating to “play”. Likewise, the “who” in “Who talks such presently” is a pronoun relating to “anyone”. Given the semantic relationship, I think we’d better call it a relative pronoun. It’s simpler, and it has one less syllable than corresponding, so it’s easier to say and has five fewer characters to help us economize on our ink usage.

Johnson: Not so fast. The that in a sentence like “I believe that you’re mistaken” is a conjunction introducing content as an object to complement believe.

Miller: And your point is…?

Johnson: Meaning, whether we call it a corresponding pronoun or a relative pronoun, it’s a clause marker grammatically functioning as conjunction, right?

Miller: Even so, calling it a conjunction would just confuse the fuddy-duddies even more. I say we should stick with relative pronoun.

Cartwright: But, if we keep in mind the need to economize on ink, maybe we should go with relativizer. It’s got five fewer characters than relative pronoun, and people would be free to construe it either as what had been a pronoun or as what’s syntactically kinda morphed into a conjunction.

Johnson: Relativizer. Ooh – fancy schmancy. So, what should we term a clause marker that complements a transitive verb? A complementizer? Hardy har-har!

Miller: Yesterday I met a lad named Marty McFly, who left behind this hand-held device before he seemed to vanish into thin air. I shall query the device, which connects to some sort of internet system. Ah. Look here. According to Wonseok Kim, in his paper titled The Unresolved Identity of that Relative Clauses, it says:

Moreover, when we consider that relative that was previously used in an RRC and an NRRC in Early Modern English and is still used in NRRCs frequently (as argued by Auwera, 1985: 155; see Sonoda, 2006; Millward & Hayes, 2012: 262), the semantic meaning of that-RCs is still problematic because an NRRC has a propositional content (see Huddleston & Pullum, 2002: 1063).

Miller: If this device somehow foretells the future, I suspect later generations will have come to recognize who as a relative pronoun functioning as a clause marker introducing an RCC, and who and that as relative pronouns introducing NRRCs.

Cartwright: What’s this “RRC” and “NRRC” business you’re going on about?

Johnson: Let me guess it’s an abbreviation of restrictive relative clause and nonrestrictive relative clause.

Cartwright: I see, but which one’s which, and what are their respective functions?

Miller: Analogize them to the DRC and NDRC we floated as possible grammatical terms back in the early ‘80s.

Cartwright: Yeah, defining relative clause and non-defining relative clause. Those terms are easier to remember and distinguish, but they never caught on. Maybe we should try going with relative pronoun to test the linguistic waters and, if they're a hit, we just never mind the skyrocketing cost of ink we could save if we had gone with relativizer.

Johnson: So, all in favor of relative pronoun say, “Aye”.

Miller: An enthusiastic Aye.

Cartwright: Aye, despite my reservations.

Johnson: So let it be written, so let it be done.

_____

In present-day English, we still have instances of pronouns that begin a sentence in the archaic OSV phrasing, but they’re they're the exceptions to the prosaic norm. E.g., Cool Hand Luke’s “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate” or “Where we first met was a graduation party”. The analysis becomes SVO if the pronouns are transposed as “A failure to communicate is what we’ve got here” and “A graduation party was where we first met.”

I anticipate you’re now asking, “In those latter examples, aren’t the pronouns what and where functioning both as (1) what you call stative objects (more traditionally deemed subject complements) of “is” and “was” respectively, as well as (2) subject pronouns in the second clauses that include “what” and “where” in a grammatical inversion? Grammar traditionalists often dismiss such occurrences as solecisms. That ain’t good enough for me or for Sister Noraleen, who introduced me to the concept of zeugma and syllepsis. See my user page (i.e., not my talk page) for the full narrative.

IMHO:

• "Sister Noraleen is one of the nuns whom I respect” is universally construed to be grammatically correct, with whom traditionally construed in apposition to nuns as a restrictive relative pronoun (oblique case) under an OSV grammatical analysis where whom is an object accused solely by respect (thereby corresponding to nuns in the oblique case accused by of).
• “Sister Noraleen is one of the nuns who I respect” is correct with who construed as a protologistic adjectival conjunction (or as a relativizer as a conjunction) under a grammatical analysis where nuns is an object – by way of zeugma – accused by the preposition of and by the transitive verb respect (i.e., per OSV).
• “Sister Noraleen is one of the nuns who I respect” is traditionally deemed incorrect with who construed as a restrictive relative pronoun (oblique case) under an OSV grammatical analysis contrary to who as a lexical item deemed to always have a nominative case identity.
• "Sister Noraleen is one of the nuns, whom I respect” is traditionally deemed correct with whom construed as a non-restrictive relative pronoun (oblique case). I, by contrast, deem consider this whom to be not a relative pronoun, but a parenthetic adjectival pronoun. Silly me, taking a syntactical approach rather than abstract non-definitional or non-essential-informational approach that interpolates how proponents of such conclusions premise their rationalizations.
• "Sister Noraleen is one of the nuns, who I respect” is traditionally deemed correct, with who construed as a non-restrictive relative pronoun that either (1) contradicts the traditional construction of who as having a nominative case identity, or (2) is treated as solecism so regularly encountered that who may now be construed to have an oblique case identity. For me, both arguments are simply ludicrous grammatical cop-outs that are mooted upon deeming who to be a parenthetic adjectival pronoun within a parenthetic adjectival clause.

Both of the articles you just linked expound on theory that I’ve long considered with nearly zero interest in researching how primary linguistic sources characterize the relevant grammar. For me, it’s neither gratifying when I stumble across papers or book excerpts that agree with my perspective, nor is it daunting when I consider how traditionalists might find it laughable that I spurn usage of well-entrenched grammatical terms. My constant gripe relates mostly to traditional phrases whose SUP contradict sematic usage of ordinary vocabulary.

E.g., don’t get me started on my inferences re when, why, and how the terms past participle and present participle were coined. It suffices to say that I empathize with ESL students who can’t fathom how there's a present aspect in “I was swimming yesterday“ or what past aspect relates to “You will be forgiven if you don’t readily know this bit of trivia”. IMHO, the rationale for the names of those participles is understandable from a historical perspective but wholly inadequate to teaching English as a lingua franca in the modern world. Describing such counterintuitive terms as historical conventions that must be assigned to memory further cements English as being rife with crazy-quilt grammatical terms and contradictory analyses.

Another day, another rant. Kent Dominic·(talk) 20:30, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the rant.

I wasn't talking about your problems with terminology in pedagogical contexts. I was talking about the editing of the article. Bathrobe (talk) 22:05, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

I think it's time to wind this long and very confusing thread down. We keep arguing over old ground. I personally don't think relative is the best choice terminologically but it's not that inscrutable, either, if understood as a clause that relates back (or forward, depending on the language) to a noun or noun phrase in the so-called main clause (I don't want to wrangle about "main clause", either).

As for the dispute over the status of pronoun, yes, that is worth discussing but doesn't necessarily vitiate the entire analysis, nor does the dispute over the status of relativiser, ugly as that term may be.

As for the status of the "relative clause", as far as I can see, all "relative clauses" are basically (so-called) embedded sentences within which the main clause N/NP (antecedent or head) has a syntactic role of some sort. In many cases the antecedent or head is not represented by a pronoun but is simply omitted (i.e., leaving a gap). Notwithstanding Kent's Korean students' objections, fragmenting the clause into "phrases" or "words" serves little purpose and only makes the grammar harder to understand.

I know Kent disagrees with all or most of the above, and he has explained his objections admirably. Moreover, even linguists disagree over the correct analysis and naming of the phenomenon. Further wrangling over both terminology and analysis is fruitless, as this thread has amply demonstrated. I propose we should call it quits. Bathrobe (talk) 21:38, 9 April 2024 (UTC)