This week I have learned that it is impossible for me to read undergraduate prose within fifty feet of an unoccupied computer. Fighting through their awkward sentence constructions and stilted, thesaurus-driven vocabulary takes more concentration than I can muster when there is anything remotely interesting to do nearby. Honestly, it’s a mystery to me how so many college students can be so bad at putting coherent ideas together on paper.
But, with this understanding, I was able to make good progress for a while this afternoon by isolating myself at a table outside of Phoenix Grill, a little coffee-and-sandwiches deal on campus. Then I got distracted by an out-of-place smell. Confused, I turned to the student a the next table over, and he answered a number of my questions at once.
Me: Does it smell like weed to you?
Student: Heh. Yeah.
(short pause)
Student: I’m smoking it.
Student: <showed me his bowl>
Student: <grinned dopily>
Me: Oh. Oooooh.
As some of you know, I spend a small, but still unjustifiably large amount of time railing against linguistic prescriptivism, at least about rules that don’t matter. One of the ones that has continued to bother me since I began thinking about this topic was MSWord’s incessant complaining that “which” clauses must follow a comma while “that” clauses can under no circumstances do so. The vast majority of times I seemed to be in violation of the rule Word was applying, and on reflection I could hear no mistake in the grammar as I had it originally.
So I planned to write a post in response to this analysis of the mistake, which seemed to be to illustrate what was wrong with this distinction. It explains the commonly held view (“that” is for restrictive clauses; “which” for nonrestrictive clauses) and provides examples to demonstrate. So:
The painting, which was hanging in the foyer, was stolen.vs.
The painting that was hanging in the foyer was stolen.
But while my first reaction was to simply point out that competent language users don’t really hear a mistake when “that” and “which” are used interchangeably, I a better explanation of what is going on here:
Which and who (occasionally whom, but that’s another thread) can be used in restrictive relatives. And so can that. And, if the relative word isn’t the subject of the clause, you can also just use [ZERO] if you like.
On the other hand
In non-restrictive relative clauses, that MAY NOT be used. If you did use that, you’d have to do without the commas or intonation dip, and you’d convert the clauses to restrictive use:
The turkey that was overcooked was nonetheless flavorful.
(implies there was another one that wasn’t overcooked)I deducted the cost of the duck that I gave to an orphanage.
(implies there was another, undonated, duck)
I can see the distinction invoked here. My one reservation is the intonation dip seems to be what signals that the nonrestrictive meaning is intended, so it’s not clear that over time we won’t just increasingly find “that” following a dip. But there might be stronger resistance to this than to using “which” in restrictive clauses, having to do with broader semantic role of “that” (e.g., that it serves to pick out one thing from several; it “points to” the turkey that was overcooked versus the turkey that wasn’t).
Such are my admittedly naïve thoughts on the topic. What are yours?