Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!cmcl2!yale!husc6!rutgers!lll-crg!styx!mordor!sri-spam!sri-unix!hplabs!decwrl!labrea!su-russell!goldberg
From: goldberg@su-russell.ARPA (Jeffrey Goldberg)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: which vs. that
Message-ID: <216@su-russell.ARPA>
Date: Sat, 15-Nov-86 23:22:12 EST
Article-I.D.: su-russe.216
Posted: Sat Nov 15 23:22:12 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 16-Nov-86 07:25:42 EST
References: <16381@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <215@su-russell.ARPA>
Reply-To: goldberg@su-russell.UUCP (Jeffrey Goldberg)
Organization: Stanford University, CSLI
Lines: 65
Summary: Proper citation of an argument I reported, and a discussion of scholarly propriaty wrt Usenet info.

I realize that it is odd to follow up ones own posting, but there
is some misleading information in my posting which is best to
clarify as soon as possible.

In article <215@su-russell.ARPA> goldberg@su-russell.UUCP
(Jeffrey Goldberg (that's me)) writes:

>                                                      The COMP
>people use a(n) historical argument that is rather subtle.  The
>deictic pronoun "that" and the sentential COMP "that" evolved from
>a common source (a pronoun).  The split between the two occurred
>prior the development of the "that" in RCs.  Historical linguistic
>theory predicts that one will never find a COMP turning into a PN,
>while the other direction is just fine.  Therefore the "that" in an
>RC can't be a PN or RP.

>       I will say that a majority of modern syntacticians believe
>in the RP analysis without question.

Actually, the particular argument I mentioned for the COMP
analysis has not appeared in print.  The argument (if I
represented it at all accurately) is due to Nancy Wiegand
Assistant Professor of Linguistics and English at the University
of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  My previous posting suggested that
this idea had been around for a while, while in fact Wiegand's
argument has not appeared in print and has not been
distributed.

The RP argument has been around for quite a while and has worked
its way into many accounts relative clauses.  For a recent
example see Gerald Gazdar's "Unbounded Dependencies and
Coordinate Structures" in Linguistic Inquiry 198[12].  I do not,
of hand, know the original source for that argument.

In general, much of what I post the this newsgroup is based on
the work of various colleagues and instructors.  Given the
informality of USENET I have not made citations that I would
have in a more scholarly write-up.  So I ask that if anyone
wants to use of refer to anything that I have posted, please get
in touch with me to get the appropriate references.  In the
future I will try to be careful about attribution of ideas.  In
the past I have only cited what I would call recommended
reading.  Because of the immediacy and the vastness of the net
many ideas of "prepublication nature" get distributed in an
informal way.  This means that when we sit down to work we must
take an extra effort to find the sources of various ideas and
facts which may have been developed through our contact with the
net.

I realize that there are probably no more than a handful of
professional linguists reading sci.lang (at least the ratio of
postings about grammar/spelling/usage flames to issues of "the
science of language" seem to suggest this.)  I still feel that
it is important to point this out.

Jeff Goldberg 
ARPA:   goldberg@russell.stanford.edu, goldberg@csli.stanford.edu
UUCP:   ...!hplabs!russell.stanford.edu!goldberg

cryptography, terrorist, DES, drugs, cipher, secret, decode,
NSA, CIA, NRO.
 The above is food for the NSA line eater.  Add it to your
 .signature and you too can help overflow the NSA's ability to
 scan all traffic going in or out of the USA looking for
 "significant" words.  (I am told that this is no joke.)