Timeline for Can relative pronouns be omitted in some regions?
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22 events
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| Jan 12, 2017 at 18:12 | history | edited | Jasper |
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| Jan 1, 2016 at 18:04 | history | edited | CowperKettle |
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| Jun 27, 2013 at 11:05 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/#!/StackEnglishLL/status/350208230829461504 | ||
| Jun 21, 2013 at 6:02 | vote | accept | Listenever | ||
| Jun 21, 2013 at 4:26 | history | edited | StoneyB on hiatus | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jun 21, 2013 at 4:06 | answer | added | StoneyB on hiatus | timeline score: 4 | |
| Jun 20, 2013 at 4:14 | comment | added | user230 | It might not actually be regional, but to my Midwestern ears, it sounds Southern. | |
| Jun 19, 2013 at 23:41 | history | edited | Martha | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Generally, people are born *in* a state
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| Jun 17, 2013 at 11:19 | comment | added | StoneyB on hiatus | @FumbleFingers One however from 1909, and the other a work of fiction set in the first half of the 19th century. | |
| Jun 15, 2013 at 17:52 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | So apparently as in such contexts isn't a particularly BrE usage then. Interestingly, after ignoring dups there are 3 instances of kind of man as would in GB, and it's easy to see 2 of them are American. | |
| Jun 15, 2013 at 17:35 | comment | added | StoneyB on hiatus | @FumbleFingers Pretty much what OED says: “The antecedent such is also replaced by that, those, or entirely omitted, leaving as an ordinary relative pronoun = That, who, which. Cf. Norse use of som. Obs. in standard English but common dial. in England and the United States.” | |
| Jun 15, 2013 at 17:31 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @StoneyB: Yeah, I use it myself sometimes (when I'm feeling "rustic/plebby"). But I actually think of it as a non-standard substitute for that - I only put the "such as" idea in because I guessed that might have been the origin, but that's certainly not what's in my mind when I use it. | |
| Jun 15, 2013 at 16:52 | comment | added | StoneyB on hiatus | @FumbleFingers I think of that as a mostly British usage. OED 1 (As, 24.) suggests that this is a reduced form of such ... as, but I doubt any modern user thinks of it that way. | |
| Jun 15, 2013 at 15:59 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @StoneyB: In fact, Steinbeck's is the only instance of "That’s a smell could" in Google Books. I tried looking for the same feature in something a bit more likely to occur, because I'm pretty sure in BrE (dunno about AmE), the position you call a "subject null-relativizer" would often be filled with as (presumably a shortening of such as). I found a few each of he's a man as could/would/should. Not many, but certainly more than I found of the same construction without "as". | |
| Jun 15, 2013 at 13:13 | comment | added | StoneyB on hiatus | @FumbleFingers I'd put it differently: it's not a use they should go out of their way to use, but they do need to learn it if they're going to actually talk to people - or read many interesting books. | |
| Jun 15, 2013 at 13:06 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @StoneyB: It's perfectly common in UK casual and/or uneducated speech too. I wouldn't want to get too bogged down in whether this "subject null-relativizer" is properly described as "ungrammatical", but I really don't think it's a speech pattern anyone should go out of their way to learn. You wouldn't expect an English teacher to include this sort of thing on the curriculum. | |
| Jun 15, 2013 at 4:51 | comment | added | StoneyB on hiatus | Your sentences qualify as those 'pseudo-relatives'; but my dialect, at least, permits sentences which do not: The guy Ø sold me this said it had been in his family for 80 years. Anybody Ø needs to talk to me knows where to find me. And McCawley isn't willing to go so far as to call such sentences as yours pseudo-relatives. He only 'mentions' somebody else's observation that omission of a subject relative pronoun is common 'in a class of cases that appears to coincide with what I call pseudo-relatives'. | |
| Jun 15, 2013 at 2:53 | comment | added | Listenever | @StoneyB, The book seems to say the structure as 'pseudo-relatives' (p449-51) "..."less tightly connected" with the preceding NP than restrictive relatives are with their heads.. | |
| Jun 15, 2013 at 0:47 | comment | added | StoneyB on hiatus | @FumbleFingers I'm going to dissent. 1) Steinbeck's got a pretty good ear: his inventions are grounded in ordinary US speech. 2) In that speech the subject null-relativizer is almost as common as the uncontroversial object null-relativizer. It is (just for instance) frequent in my speech, and I regard it not as ungrammatical but as colloquial. McCawley, Ch. 13, fn 4, notes that it was common in Old and Middle English. As far as I know the use is general American rather than regional. | |
| Jun 15, 2013 at 0:17 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | ...also note that more often than not, such "non-grammatical" usages don't reflect "regional dialectal usages" as such. They're characteristic of uneducated Anglophones with poor linguistic skills everywhere (and often "casual speech" from people who know perfectly well they're being ungrammatical). | |
| Jun 14, 2013 at 23:42 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @ Listenever: You really do make things difficult for yourself by attempting to understand modern standard usage with texts like this. Steinbeck's narrative style itself is fine (there's nothing particularly unusual about his own words, apart from being a bit dated). But when it comes to reported speech, you should bear in mind that he's not writing books intended to be read by people who speak like his characters. He might quite possibly invent non-standard usages for them, because he writes fiction, not accurate history books. | |
| Jun 14, 2013 at 23:20 | history | asked | Listenever | CC BY-SA 3.0 |