I was teaching how to give non-essential information using relative clauses this week. The use of the word ‘that’ in these clauses to refer to people is always controversial (see here:http://data.grammarbook.com/blog/pronouns/old-superstions-die-hard/), however a student told me that she had previously been taught to never follow a comma with the word ‘that’. Is this correct?
The example sentence which she said was wrong was:
I tried to explain that when writing we would usually use ‘which’ instead of ‘that’ in this sentence and that this sentence is more informal, however, she was sure that there is a firm rule which states that you can never use the word ‘that’ after a comma. Does such a rule exist?
Nope, but that sentence is horrorshow. And for the love of all that is holy, get them to include the info in the subject noun-phrase instead of using 68000 relly clauses. Chinglish-vanquishing 101, in my writing classes.
Tell her to google it. She’ll find many examples of where that is not true. Students are often taught over-simplified rules because teachers want a peaceful life and because they are true in a lot of cases. However, language is dynamic and full of anomolies. Teaching her to google or run it through a free concordancer such as lextutor will make her a more autonomous learner.
I’m not a big fan of absolute rules, but “that” is uncommon in non-defining relative clauses and it is probably better to not use it then. Often when you say things out loud, there’s some confusion over whether it’s defining or not, and it may then “sound” right.
That being said, I wish we could move from right and wrong to standard and non-standard.
Oh, and what was said above, please don’t let students write relative clause after relative clause.
“The school food, that tastes terrible, is available in the canteen.”
Yes, I would call that sentence wrong too. It grates against the inner language processing circuitry in my head.
In my opinion, it would be either:
“The school food, which tastes terrible, is available in the canteen.” (meaning that all the school food is terrible)
or
“School food that tastes terrible is available in the canteen.” (meaning that you can get terrible tasting food there, but it’s not all bad.)
Of course, these are only demonstrations of the mechanics of relative clauses. There are better ways of expressing these ideas.
It’s fairly clear from the context though that the student is referring to defining and non-defining relative clauses. (should I have used a comma after though?) What is annoying is that they often memorize the difference as “the one with the comma” instead of looking at what it does. Can you use that after a comma in a relative clause? Well the answer lies in the idea that “that” is uncommon in non-defining relative clauses in which there’s a comma. It has nothing to do with the comma. It’s the butchering of a fairly simple grammatical preference.
[quote=“Chris”]They remember lots of rules, such as “you can’t put two verbs together.”
But if they dare try, it might help strengthen their English skills.[/quote]
Okay, but to be fair, ‘dare’ in the above sentence is an auxiliary, or the ‘to’ in “dare [to] try” is gapped. The same follows for “help [them] strengthen.”
It’s one of those things where, yes, on the bare surface of things, two verbs “are put together,” but any syntactic analysis wouldn’t give you a [VP [V][V]] tree structure.
A real counterexample, if this even makes sense to enough speakers, would be something like this: “The sleigh bells jingle-jangled,” but there are other rules which cover that.