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Relative that and prepositional complementation1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2008

Aimo Seppänen
Aimo Seppänen
Affiliation:
Department of EnglishUniversity of GõteborgS-412 98 GõteborgSweden
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Extract

Ever since the days of Jespersen, voices have been raised which argue that relative that is not a pronoun like who and which, but a conjunction/complementizer, as shown in particular by the ban on the sequence preposition + that, which is claimed to be best described by treating that as a conjunction. Taking up the question of the proper analysis of that as it appears in the word's relationship to prepositions, the present paper argues that in actual fact the descriptions built by Jespersen and various generative grammarians on the view of that as a conjunction/complementizer are not at all adequate to deal with some crucial facts of the word's syntax. Noting then some further facts which even the traditional ban is unable to deal with, the paper develops a new approach to the question which is derived from an examination of Finnish relatives and which handles all the English facts noted in terms of a general principle about the internal order of elements within the fronted relative phrase. The principle invoked is completely neutral as regards the word-class status of that, but some of the facts explored strongly argue for the classification of the word as a pronoun.

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Articles
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English Language & Linguistics , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , May 1997 , pp. 111 - 133
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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