Date: Wed, 16 Mar 1994 18:35:00 -0400 From: tthonus Subject: Re: A New Genitive Relative Pronoun? Dave Bergdahl comments on "in which" as an "all-purpose relative pronoun." I recently wrote a paper for a syntax class on the phenomenon based on an analysis of 30 written sentences. The majority of them contained relativization of what Prideaux and Baker (1986) term the "OO type (e.g. "The dog chased the man [that the cat bit]). I concluded this way: "The writers of *in which can have it all: an air of formality, an overt WH-relative surface form generalizable to all non-dative contexts, a stranded rather than piped preposition, and the simplicity of _that_ syntactic patterning." Interested ADS-L readers may also be interested in Riley and Parker (1986) and Montgomery and Bailey (1991), both published in _American Speech_. I think we're witnessing language change in progress.