Date:  Wed, 16 Mar 1994 18:35:00 -0400

From:  tthonus <tthonus[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]INDIANA.EDU>

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.