User talk:Doric Loon/Archive 2020

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Re. split infinitive

Thanks for the apology, but it was unnecessary. I braced myself for reversions but instead I found mere stylistic revisions, which hardly ever faze me in a scholarly work. From my POV, the article is essentially the same now as before your edits. Give me substance over style any day. I appreciate your seeing what my edits were getting at and your leaving the sense of them intact. Cheers. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 14:55, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

Ooh - I just read your comments about relative pronouns. As a linguistic term of art coined in the 15th century, the taxon has long outlived its usefulness. It originally was intended to explain how the demonstrative "that" in a sentence like "That place I'm from is round Aberdeen" relates to the so-called pronoun in a sentence like, "Round Aberdeen is the place that I'm from," which was a revolutionary semantic shift in everyday English usage in its day. The thing is, ALL pronouns are relative in a generic sense, so "relative pronoun" is taxonomically meaningless - especially for English L2 speakers. In my own lexicon, I take a functional linguistics approach: A sentence like "Graeme Dunphy, who is a professor of translation," entails a parenthetical pronoun that establishes a parenthetical clause. By contrast, a sentence like "Graeme Dunphy is a professor who lives in Scotland" entails an appositive conjunction that entails an appositive phrase. Traditionalists want to slash my tires, but the concepts regarding "parenthetical" and "appositive" are readily translatable whereas "relative pronoun" traps the uninitiated into thinking that it refers to words regarding kinship. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 15:38, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

Hi, that's fun. Yes, I could see you were coming at this from the functional linguistics side. Are you at a university somewhere? I come from a rather different position. Not only am I professor of translation, as you noted, I also teach English and German as foreign languages, and academically come from the historical linguistics side, with a great interest in comparative linguistics. That means on the one hand I am possibly more pragmatic than you, and on the other I am always looking for terminology that works across the languages, as far as possible.

Far from being at a university. I spend each 14 hours a day writing. The seven-part 265,000-word novel is done. The 450,000-word corresponding textbook, segmented for (A) L1 English composition and (B) upper-intermediate to advanced level ESL students is 89% done. This is after 15 years of teaching ESL in East Asia, where I'm currently based in Seoul. Pragmatics is really what got me started on the textbook, which mostly entails an e-based glossary definition for every word and phrase - with each phrase parsed word-by-word - and each sense of the respective definition hyperlinked to a pop-up for the text in the novel. So while I say that I'm "writing," it's mostly encoding. That and working with Merriam-Webster to fix a boatload of anomalous definitions there. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 23:28, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

I really don't think anyone is confused about "relative pronoun" having to do with kinship, and in particular I can tell you that L2 speakers are especially likely to understand the traditional terminology of English grammar, so there are no issues there. Changing terminology when an entire profession of language teachers have more important things to do is not helpful, so dropping the phrase "relative pronoun" would need far better reasons than you have aduced. I am very comfortable with the idea that within a functional linguistics discourse you might want to use different terms that suit your analysis, but I don't think it is good to come out of that environment and be prescriptive to people with quite different needs. So please be a little bit thoughtful there.

My remark about "kinship" was tongue-in-cheek. Most of my former ESL students were better acquainted with grammar terms than their native-speaking ESL instructors. In my experience, most ESL instructors wind up confabulating in their attempts to to distinguish functional distinctions between restrictive and nonrestrictive relative pronouns. I don't fault them for it. No textbook, dictionary, encyclopedia, or scholarly paper that I've read has provided what I deem to be an internally consistent explanation of how they differ in practical terms that address typical ESL students' questions on the topic. They ask questions pertaining to the difference in composing and lexically identifying the differences a la:

I played football at university.
I played football when at university. (conjunction or restrictive RP?)
I played football when I attended university. (conjunction or RRP?)
When I attended university, I played football. (adverb, conjunction, or nonrestrictive RP?)
I attended university, where I played football. (conjunction or NRP?)
I attended a university where I played football. (conjunction or RRP?)
I attended a university, which had a varsity football team. (why the comma?)
I attended a university which had a varsity football team. (why no comma?)
I attended a university that had a varsity football team. (conjunction or restrictive RP?)
I fondly remember that time that I played football. (conjunction or RRP?)
I fondly remember that time which I played football. (conjunction or RRP?)
I fondly remember that time when I played football. (conjunction or RRP?)
I fondly remember that time, when I played football. (why the comma?)

In sentences 10-13, I purposely included the awkwardly demonstrative "that" rather than the determiner "the" in sentences to illustrate how I disagree with those who claim no functional distinction between the so-called RRPs, that and which. (Within the RP I concede no distinction, but from my extra-paradigmatic view the differentiation is quite stark as evidenced by the grammatical sound Sentence 10 but grammatically suspect Sentence 11.) Long story short: traditional linguistic approaches to parsing the above sentences inevitably leads to inter-paradigmatic inconsistencies. Representative among them is the the stratagem that asserts how a RRP is amenable to omission without affecting grammatical integrity. Really? Then Sentence 2 includes an RRP but sentence 3 includes a conjunction. How does that analytical stratagem square with the patterns in Sentences 5-9? And how does that bear on the semantic intent of sentences 12-13? Ha! Ultimately, prescriptivism is not at all relevant to my linguistic interests. My qualms lie with linguists who use naive terminology (and dictionaries that perpetuate them with head-scratching lexical entries with inane definitions and criminally irresponsible mismatched examples) regarding relative pronouns/relative clauses. Kent Dominic·(talk) 00:18, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

I personally cannot see that relative that is in any way a conjunction, and putting it beside a structurally entirely dissimilar sentence in which that IS a conjunction doesn't make it seem more plausible. "I hope that it will rain" and "That is the dog that barked!" have three entirely different kinds of that. Most dictionaries would list them as three different words, and certainly three different parts of speech. Etymologically linked, of course, but that's not the point. To see the relative that as a conjunction involves a kind of double-think that defies intuition, for me at least.

In my lexicon:

"The woman who arrived is my sister" entails an appositive conjunction. (Regrets to anyone who is mired in the belief that only pronouns can be anaphoric.)
"The woman, who arrived, is my sister" entails a parenthetical pronoun.
"The book that I read is fascinating" entails an appositive conjunction
"The book I read is fascinating" entails a zero appositive conjunction
"The book which I read is fascinating" entails an appositive conjunction. (Note: I would never use such a sentence except to avoid repetition in a rare case that I'd already used an instance of "that" in the same sentence. I don't excoriate those who use such a structure despite my own aversion.)
"The book, which I read is fascinating" entails a parenthetical pronoun.
"I hope that it will rain" entails a nominal conjunction. (Regrets to anyone who is enamored of the term, complementizer.)
"I hope it will rain" entails a zero nominal conjunction.
"That is the dog that barked" entails a demonstrative pronoun.
"That dog that barked" entails a demonstrative determiner.
"That I think that that that that that man used is not that different than that that that that that woman used is weird." =

"That (nominal conjunction) I think that (nominal conjunction) that (demonstrative determiner) that (lexical category) that (appositive conjunction) that (demonstrative determiner) guy used is not that (adverb) different than that (demonstrative pronoun) that (lexical category) that (appositive conjunction) that (demonstrative determiner) woman used is weird."

I pity those who construe some uses of "that" to be an adjective rather than a determiner or other uses to be a pronoun rather than a conjunction, yet I fully understand the tortured pedigree of such nomenclature. Kent Dominic·(talk) 01:16, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

In the RP talk page you pick up on the important distinction between restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses and suggest you are comfortable using the word "relative" for one of them but not the other. Have you thought about much more difficult that makes things for people working across languages? French and German do not use punctuantion and intonation to distinguish these.

You might have misremembered something. I habitually maintain, as I said on the RP talk page, that "EVERY pronoun is 'relative' in the sense that it relates to SOME anaphoric, cataphoric, or extratextual referent." Indeed I went on to say that linguistic commentators "are correct to use relative pronoun (or a cognate pronominal term) only when the pronoun occurs parenthetically," but perhaps I was remiss not to reiterate how the "relative" element of the term is, for me, hardly elucidating of anything. I recognize how traditional distinctions, as well as those in my own lexicon as excerpted above, scan be typographically represented via punctuation that varies across languages. Yet, my intent is not to insist that typography can or should universally reflect prosody, or that prosody universally reflects the distinctions under discussion. I.e., in speech, it's often impossible to distinguish, "The restaurant where we ate was excellent" from "The restaurant, where we ate, was excellent." The linguistic distinction is clear in writing; the semantic distinction, for my tastes, is negligible in prosody. Which harkens back to my arguments against the linguistic baggage attached to the term, relative pronoun...

In practical usage, these four sentences are semantically equivalent:

"The restaurant where we ate was excellent." (Neutral register entails an appositive conjunction as I see it.)
"The restaurant in which we ate was excellent." (Formal register entails a prepositional phrase wherein "which" is an object pronoun and "we ate" is an object complement)
"The restaurant that we ate in was excellent." (Informal register that entails an appositive conjunction and a stranded preposition that nonetheless pervades colloquial speech.)
"The restaurant we ate in was excellent." (Informal register that entails a zero appositive conjunction and a stranded preposition.)

In my experience, Sentence 4 is the most problematic from a cross-linguistics perspective. Why? ESL speakers and native English speakers alike are scarcely aware of the "zero" factor at play here, but ESL speakers additionally fumble with how prepositions properly work. So I regularly hear ESLers say, e.g., "The restaurant we ate was excellent." Grammatically correct; semantically hilarious! For anyone who asks why you spontaneously chuckle upon hearing such a sentence, try cogently explaining the semantic difference between "The restaurant where we ate was excellent" and "The restaurant, where we ate, was excellent." Traditionalists who offer feeble rationalizations such as essential versus nonessential information are begging the question why anyone would deign to include nonessential verbiage in a sentence under any circumstances. The defining versus non-defining stratagem begs the same question.

For language that make no distinctions, including German and French (as well as Spanish and Korean in my own experience), all I can say is that many traditional linguistic concepts, as those that are as associated with the RRP and NRP terminology, needlessly obscure the actual functions of the lexical elements involved. To explain that "New York is the city that never sleeps" entails an appositive conjunction (further delineated as expositive as distinguished from other varieties), and not a restrictive relative pronoun Virtually everyone understands how a conjunction appends or conjoins elements within a sentence. RRPs, NRPs, relativizers, and complementizers takes a fair amount of additional relative indoctrinationivizers. Kent Dominic·(talk) 03:04, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

Nichts für ungut. --Doric Loon (talk) 17:14, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

Doric_Loon: Well, if you want to keep the source you have to use the word in the source. There's a big difference between "to-infinitive" which as your source says is a synonym for "full infinitive", and "to-infinitive phrase" which implies a phrase made up of a "to" and an infinitive, i.e. the "to" is not part of the infinitive.

Kent_Dominic: Point well taken. Chalk it up to inadvertence: to-infinitive is a Wiktionary term; to-infinitive phrase is the term in my own lexicon. Next year someone here will source the latter from my textbook. Cheers. Kent Dominic·(talk) 03:18, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

The "that" challenge

Find five relatively well educated people who have no particular interest or background in linguistics but who are functionally capable of speaking English. Poll them with the following:

In the sentence, 'It's true that we live in the Milky way,' the word, that represents:

(a) A complementizer.

(b) A conjunction.

(c) A relativizer.

(d) A nonrestrictive relative pronoun.

(e) A restrictive relative pronoun.

I daresay none of the five people will know what (a) or (c) is supposed to mean. If anyone guesses (b), ask how the conjunction operates. If they guess (d) or (e), ask what the pronoun stands for. If no one has a reasonable idea, offer two choices:

"that" stands for true.
"that" stands for the phrase, is true.

Hint: Until 1935, the best guess invariably would have been a toss-up between (d) or (e) depending on one's recollection of childhood grammar. The term, relativizer, was a linguistic attempt to rectify some anomalous instances where the sense of pronoun was noticeably attenuated in certain theretofore applications of the relative pronoun term. Complementizer was coined in 1965 to distinguish "that" as a word conjoining a transitive verb and a nominal clause, e.g. "I hope that you're okay." (Complementizer? I say no; a word that conjoins stuff is a conjunction!)

So, what's the answer to the trick question? Traditional grammar says (d) is just plain wrong. Twentieth century linguists say (a) is nonrelevant. Anyone who chooses (d) wouldn't know that the "that" in "It's true that we live in the Milky way" represents the phrase, "is true," which becomes apparent from the original inculcation of relative pronoun from what theretofore had been rendered as, "That we live in the Milky way is true." Anyone who guesses (c), however, would know this. If anyone guesses that the that in question is a conjunction, please inform me and I'll buy you both a beer or soft drink of your choice. If anyone guesses that it's an appositive conjunction expounding the "it's true" proposition, my intellectual property stake in all of this will take a huge hit.

You said, "L2 speakers are especially likely to understand the traditional terminology of English grammar." I don't fully agree. I'd characterize it as, "L2 speakers are especially likely to be acquainted with the traditional terminology of English grammar." In my view, the conceptual foundations of certain terms, including relative pronoun, relative clause, subordinate clause, main verb, past participle and present participle (to name a few) are beyond "understanding" in a cogent sense despite how each term serves a laudable taxonomic purpose in relation to the less-than-precise class of referents they're supposed to represent. I can all but guarantee that no one except the pedants who specialize in linguistic trivia can rightfully account for the inclusion of a present participle in the past perfect progressive tense. It would more aptly be termed the pretty participle or the bread-baking participle. In my lexicon, it's a continuative participle, which coincides with the continuative aspect that it represents regardless of tense, adjectival use, or adverbial use. The same continuative aspect applies to a gerund despite its distinction from participles. Okay, I think I've exhausted the inclination to rant any further about this. For today. Cheers. Kent Dominic·(talk) 06:15, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

My goodness you can use a lot of big words to make a simple thing sound promblematic! The answer to your initial question is (b) conjunction. That is completely obvious to me, and any of my students would know it. Any German would know it, because they spell "dass" with a double "s" when it has this function, with a single "s" if it has any of the others, so the entire nation sees this primary school knowledge. As for English speakers, anyone who has ever seriously tried to learn a language would have at least a good chance of getting it right. It's not a difficult question. As you say, (a) and (c) are technical terms for linguistic insiders and the layman won't know what to make of them (and shouldn't be asked to). But (d) and (e) are obviously wrong for the reason you give: it's not a pronoun if you can't say what noun it stands for. People who are not interested in language might be fuzzy here, but that's fine - I don't know much about football. People who ARE interested in language don't need to be "pedants for linguistic trivia" to understand it, because it is one of the basic building blocks that you need if you are to use any Western European language without native-speaker instinct. Now we can argue about the terminology, but (a) is so different from (d) and (e) that you couldn't pass your GCSE French without being aware they are different things. The difference between (d) and (e) is more subtle, and in a sense specifically English. Advanced L2 speakers will know it because it affects comma rules, but even linguistically aware native speakers have mostly never thought about it (and have no reason to).

The question you have to ask yourself is why any of this matters. "Pedants for linguistic trivia" (which I suppose might include you and me) will find this stuff fun, but the rest of the world doesn't need it and doesn't want it. It wants just enough grammatical clarity to learn languages effectively. And for that purpose, I find most of what you say just muddies the waters. I would be excited to engage with you if all you wanted to do was discuss the fascination of your subject (which certainly has its place). I become defensive because you want the wider language-using community to change.

Final question: since when was the usefulness of a word in any way contingent on its etymology? What does a "bull market" have to do with "bulls" that it couldn't as easily have to do with "bears". Doesn't make the word less useful. I honestly don't know what the first coiners of the phrase "relative pronoun" were thinking of, and while I could make a guess about what it has to do with "relativeness" it wouldn't be more "relative" than other pronouns. But so what? We have a term which is more or less universally known, and not just in English; we have a concept that needs a term. Asking the worlds language learners not to talk about "relative pronouns" on the basis of etymology is as silly as asking the world's stockbrokers to stop talking about "bull markets". Why? An enormous effort by millions of people because in your mind the term is untidy?

So my advice is this: write as many Wikipedia articles as you like about functional linguistics, but in a Wikipedia article on a traditional grammatical concept, leave the terminology as it would be in an EFL text. --Doric Loon (talk) 16:23, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

Doric Loon: My goodness you can use a lot of big words to make a simple thing sound promblematic!

Kent Dominic: Hey, don't blame me! I truly wish that most of the big-sounding linguistic terms had never been invented. At the same time, I empathize with the linguists who've tried their best to rectify the shortcomings we've inherited in the traditional approach to English grammar.

Doric Loon: The answer to your initial question is (b) conjunction.

Kent Dominic: We agree. The "relativizers" of the world would disagree.

Doric Loon: That is completely obvious to me, and any of my students would know it.

Kent Dominic: My L1 Spanish and Hebrew students also would know it. My L1 Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Thai, and Pakistani students would be challenged.

Doric Loon: Any German would know it, because they spell "dass" with a double "s" when it has this function, with a single "s" if it has any of the others, so the entire nation sees this primary school knowledge.

Kent Dominic: I'm unfamiliar with German syntax, but I've been told that it's quite similar to English.

Doric Loon: As for English speakers, anyone who has ever seriously tried to learn a language would have at least a good chance of getting it right.

Kent Dominic: I'd rate that "good chance" at 60% because I think a random person would automatically exclude complementizer and relativizer from consideration.

Doric Loon: But (d) and (e) are obviously wrong for the reason you give: it's not a pronoun if you can't say what noun it stands for.

Kent Dominic: There we disagree. I would accept an argument that (d) is correct on the assertion, that the "that" in question stands for "is true" per 15th century semantic construct. However, there are perhaps no more than a dozen people worldwide who know or care about that etymology and would accept its implications. Instead, I know of multiple thousands of people from Korea, Japan, China, India, Thailand, and Pakistan who would spontaneously say the "that" in question is a relative pronoun, based on their English L2 grammar instruction. Beyond that, hundreds of textbooks say the same, without proper justification - only laughable examples.

Doric Loon: People who ARE interested in language don't need to be "pedants for linguistic trivia" to understand it, because it is one of the basic building blocks that you need if you are to use any Western European language without native-speaker instinct.

Kent Dominic: I'm glad you've restricted your assertion to "Western European language," but I would add these two caveats ... First, I think absolutely no one needs to understand the linguistic basis of any of this. Second, and unfortunately, most L1 East Asian students, who typically learn English in their native countries public school systems and are taught by non-native English speakers, learn English in non-conversational settings. The instructor requires memorization of vocabulary lists (with words and their parts of speech) and are told to memorize. Real life syntax is barely part of the curriculum. So, because East Asian language tend to have radically different syntax than English, Western European languages (and Hebrew, I've discovered), students wind up saying stuff like, "I am nice to see arrived you safely to here that." Translation: "It's not to see (that) you arrived here safely.") Honestly, it's akin to one who thinks of what to say in L1, recalls each word verbatim from a childhood vocabulary list, tosses the word into a blender, and hopes for the best when spitting out the resulting sentence in L2 English. Too funny. Too sad. All too common. The word, that is especially intimidating for such students because English uses it for so many distinct semantic uses.

Doric Loon: Now we can argue about the terminology ...

Kent Dominic: Let's not.

Doric Loon: ... but (a) is so different from (d) and (e) that you couldn't pass your GCSE French without being aware they are different things.

Kent Dominic: I've never encountered the term, complementizer, in any textbook on basic grammar. But I had to do a quick study when students who were eager to get an upper hand on SAT, GRE, or TOEIC scores would ask questions similar to the one at the top of this section. I still laugh and cry at how useless the terminology has become.

Doric Loon: The difference between (d) and (e) is more subtle, and in a sense specifically English.

Kent Dominic: For me, as an L1 English speaker and L2 Spanish speaker, the conceptual difference is fundamental and stark. In truth, however, I admit regularly mixing up the names of (d) and (e) because the terminology isn't essential to conversational usage.

Doric Loon: Advanced L2 speakers will know it because it affects comma rules, but even linguistically aware native speakers have mostly never thought about it (and have no reason to).

Kent Dominic: Touché.

Doric Loon: The question you have to ask yourself is why any of this matters.

Kent Dominic: Okay.

Doric Loon: "Pedants for linguistic trivia" (which I suppose might include you and me) will find this stuff fun.

Kent Dominic: Sorry to say you're wrong to include me as one who finds it fun. Interesting, yes. Heart-wrenching when I encounter so many students who try to disambiguate this junk? Yes. Fun? Definitely not.

Doric Loon: The rest of the world doesn't need it ...

Kent Dominic: Du bist wieder richtig.

Doric Loon: ... and doesn't want it.

Kent Dominic: However, a chunk of the world, namely the English L2 students in East Asia, THINK they need it, which is why the linguists have tried to address the interest.

Doric Loon: It wants just enough grammatical clarity to learn languages effectively.

Kent Dominic: Agreed.

Doric Loon: And for that purpose, I find most of what you say just muddies the waters.

Kent Dominic: Hold on, please. You're scolding the messenger. I'm merely reporting the ridiculousness of it all. I'm not endorsing it.

Doric Loon: I would be excited to engage with you if all you wanted to do was discuss the fascination of your subject (which certainly has its place).

Kent Dominic: I think your conclusion is misplaced. My fascination doesn't rest in linguistics, per se. My passion relates to narratology in the largest sense of the word - more specifically: storytelling in novels and cinema.

Doric Loon: I become defensive because you want the wider language-using community to change.

Kent Dominic: Let me be clear: My tendency to identify discrepancies in traditionally accepted grammar principles is sure to rankle anyone who is wedded to accepting traditional grammar without critical analysis. I'm not waging a war against traditional grammars; I merely refuse to defend grammatical dogma that doesn't hold up to cross-linguistic analysis. And in my own writing, I refuse to use grammatical explanations that don't hold up despite widespread acceptance to the contrary.

Doric Loon: Final question: since when was the usefulness of a word in any way contingent on its etymology? What does a "bull market" have to do with "bulls" that it couldn't as easily have to do with "bears". Doesn't make the word less useful.

Kent Dominic: Right again, as far as daily conversation goes. Yet, there's a different dynamic involved when students ask precisely those kinds of questions. Fellow instructors tend to answer them with, "If I don't know, you don't need to know. Just memorize it." For me, the "it's just the way it is" reply is way too dismissive and a bit condescending vis-à-vis someone who expresses curiosity and eagerness to learn a new word or phrase. My standard reply entails the most relevant of four strategies: (1) Provide a verifiable answer, if I know it; (2) Provide fictitious yet plausible answer off the top of my narratologically fruitful head in case the question is patently inane ("Why do they call it a 'table' instead of 'chart' or list'?); (3) Assign the answer as homework; (4) Admit that I don't know the answer to a question that indeed interests me and promise an answer for the next time.

Doric Loon: I honestly don't know what the first coiners of the phrase "relative pronoun" were thinking of, and while I could make a guess about what it has to do with "relativeness" it wouldn't be more "relative" than other pronouns.

Kent Dominic: I've since learned what the thinking was when the term was coined, and I agree 100% that the "relative" part of the term is essentially meaningless nowadays.

Doric Loon: But so what? We have a term which is more or less universally known, and not just in English; we have a concept that needs a term.

Kent Dominic: You raise a Catch-22. I agree that the relative pronoun term is universally known. I agree that we have a a concept that need a term. I disagree that the term, relative pronoun adequately corresponds to ALL of the contexts in which the term is traditionally employed. Accordingly, my "It's true that we live in the Milky way" example demonstrates how someone coined relativizer in displeasure with relative pronoun. (I laud the effort; detest the alternative term.) You and I agree the example presents a conjunction - a term that EVERYBODY knows. But if some authoritative textbook (or instructor in an L2 setting) intentionally or inadvertently calls such a construct a pronoun, the student will either be (a) uncritically accepting and grammatically misinformed, or (b) rightfully suspicious and right to raise a challenge. Unlike in North American and Western European culture, students in East Asia and in the Mideast have a cultural environment that shuns students from questioning a scholarly instructor. There's a pervasive "If I as an instructor call it an X, accept it as an X even if you think it looks like a Y and smells like a Z" mentality. I'm glad to say that mentality seems to be waning, but at glacial speed. The thing is, if X is a conjunction, East Asian languages have a discrete class of corresponding words to represent it syntactically. There's no such thing as a zero conjunction in East Asian languages: "I hope (that) you're okay" doesn't make sense without the that. If X is a pronoun, however, East Asian languages tend not to have a class of corresponding words but they instead have a corresponding class of suffixes. There's no such thing as a zero pronoun in East Asian languages: "The woman (whom) you saw was my sister" doesn't make sense without the whom; "Here's the money (that) I owe you" doesn't make sense without the that. In my view, each instance of "who" and "that" in the foregoing examples are instantly recognizable as words that conjoin independent clauses. So why do traditionalists insist on calling some of them relative pronouns when their syntactical role is that of a conjunction? I'm not insisting that anyone else change. Instead, my aim is to enable ESLers to better understand the semantics entailed in various English contexts that otherwise might be misconstrued based on outmoded grammatical terms that are naive at best and duplicitous at the worst.

Doric Loon: Asking the worlds language learners not to talk about "relative pronouns" on the basis of etymology is as silly as asking the world's stockbrokers to stop talking about "bull markets". Why? An enormous effort by millions of people because in your mind the term is untidy?

Kent Dominic: Let's not jump to any conclusions. I'm not prescribing anything at all. Rather, I'm offering critical analysis as food for thought. Additionally, I'm describing the rationale for my refusal to use "relative pronoun" as a taxon in my own lexicon. I do, however, include it as a glossary entry in my textbook. Anyone who wants to know the meanings associated with the following terms (all glossed, but not otherwise used) can find them in the textbook's glossary:

relative pronoun
defining relative pronoun
nondefining relative pronoun
nonrestrictive relative pronoun
restrictive relative pronoun
complementizer
relativizer

Doric Loon:So my advice is this: write as many Wikipedia articles as you like about functional linguistics ...

Kent Dominic:Nein danke. Functional linguistics truly is not my cup of tea. It's solely incidental to the work that I do.

Doric Loon:But in a Wikipedia article on a traditional grammatical concept, leave the terminology as it would be in an EFL text.

Kent Dominic:Ahem, ahem, cough, cough. I've not yet interpolated any new terminology in the Wikipedia articles. Whether the term, to-infinitive is "traditional" or not is beyond me. I don't know its particular etymology or longevity. I just know that it's a term that's in common use and that it was apt but unused in the Split Infinitive article. You were right to point out, however, that I'd used to-infinitive phrase instead. Inadvertence. Nonetheless, if I follow your advice precisely, I should avoid substituting determiner in articles that identify the word, "many," as an adjective, as traditionalists still do. Again, it's not that I'm waging a war at tidying up the stuff here or anywhere else, for that matter. My interest here primarily relates to research on linguistic developments that have impinged on the work that I do. My edits tend to be my attempts at clarify nebulous wording or to rectify omissions. See, e.g. Active participle usage versus passive participle usage. You'll notice there that I willingly used past participle and present participle in my chart despite how those traditional terms are NOT part of the taxonomies in my own lexicon. I'm not criticizing their utility; I'm merely critical of their inclusion of the past and present elements in the terms, which needlessly confound the uninitiated. Indeed I'm not into linguistic evangelism regarding the articles here or anywhere. As a generic functionalist, I try to go with whatever works in a given context. I save my occasional rants for Talk Pages. Kent Dominic·(talk) 04:54, 21 September 2020 (UTC)

User:Kent Dominic: OK, clearly I did misunderstand where you were coming from. It sounds as though your main gripe is with bad EFL books. Here in Germany most of the books the beginners work with are pretty good, but Germany, Holland and Scandinavia are way ahead of the world there, and I have heard that in other places it is lamentable. And of course if you respond to that by preferring terminology that they don't mangle, that's understandable. I mistakenly thought you were telling us all what words WE shouldn't use.

You might find it useful to consider that a participle in a periphrastic verb form isn't really a participle any more. In English "I am going" or "I have gone" you have a two-word verb (for some reason we don't talk about a verb phrase the way we talk about a noun phrase, but maybe we should). If I had to teach a complete beginner, of course I would say that you form these with an auxiliary verb and a participle, but just as the auxiliary has nothing to do with the semantics of "being" or "having" once it is co-opted into the periphrastic verb, so the participle no longer has anything to do with its independent life as a participle. So I would not analyze "am going" as having a participle at all. The participle is a real participle when it is used adjectivally, and if you look at "a going concern" or "gone girl" then it will be clearer how "going" is focussed on the present (or at least simultaneous) situation, while "gone" is looing back the way at something that has happened to create the situation. That's why "present participle" makes perfect sense to me.

Good luck with processing all of this for a text book, though! Peace and good will! --Doric Loon (talk) 18:37, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

It's not just the EFL books that gall me. The grammar books published in England and the States, as used extensively for L1 and L2 students alike, are more invested in sales than in descriptive grammars that pass my linguistic muster. And how many instructors are likely to challenge or emend what's in those books? Even I avoid that with students, who are mostly interested in how to use the language, not on whether lamentable grammar tenets inevitably lead down a linguistic rabbit hole. Kelly, who(m) I mentioned above, was the rare exception. At 17 years old she's a linguistics savant.

I laud your observations about periphrastic verbs. (In my lexicon, they're verb catenas.) Exceptional adult student have asked this: "Why is 'going' the main verb in 'Should we be going?' when the answer ellipsis is 'Yes, we should'?" There's no rightful justification other than whatever sentimentality traditionalist have for antiquated terminology, which is STILL pervasive in modern-day textbooks for L1 as well as L2 English speakers. My former language institute required students to reply in so-called "full" sentences. In reply to, "Are you married?" an answer such as "Yes, I am" was unacceptable. Adult students regularly wondered why "am" is an auxiliary verb while "married is a main verb since "Yes I am" semantically suffices regarding the question. Those who wondered accordingly were not necessarily my best students from a conversational standpoint, but their linguistic instincts were spot on.

Other adult students regularly wondered why traditional explanations of passive voice structures are limited to past participles after a lifetime inculcation of "passive voice = 'be' verb + past participle." They'd ask, "Why isn't 'That's amazing' an example of passive voice?" Those students intuited the notion of passive participle versus active participle. Fortunately for those students in basic English conversation classes, those terms weren't in the students' vocabulary and none of those students ventured into the agent (grammar), patient (grammar) or thematic relation wormholes, which I think are linguistically sound explanations but WAY beyond the scope of ordinary L2 acquisition.

Oops, I didn't mean to go off on another rant. I'll stop there without mentioning how e.g. the Merriam-Webster dictionary has words like married entered solely as an adjective rather than as an adjectival participle, passive participle or even (*ahem*) a past participle, and without mention of its use as a the simple past tense form of "marry." Kent Dominic·(talk) 07:00, 23 September 2020 (UTC)

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