Annals of non-restrictive ‘that’

You’ll seldom see that used with a comma to set off a non-restrictive clause. Normally which does this job. (Which is also fine in restrictive clauses, by the way, despite the pseudo-rule that forbids it. The first link explains the terminology.)

My earlier post on non-restrictive that gives an idea of how rare it is, and provides an ambiguous example from Penelope Fitzgerald; I later updated with more clearcut literary examples. This post notes a few more instances of non-restrictive that used in books I recently read and re-read, respectively.

In Everest: Impossible Victory, Peter Habeler writes:

The men struck their Camp VI at 8200 metres, that is well below the place at which Mallory and Irvine were last seen.

And Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media:

The rapid increase of traffic brought in the railway, that accommodated a more specialized form of wheel than the road.

The wheel, that began as extended feet, took a great evolutionary step into the movie theatre.

Habeler’s line is ambiguous: that could either be a relative pronoun (or perhaps a subordinator), used where we would expect to see which; or it could be a demonstrative, which means there’s a comma splice where we would expect a dash or full stop.

You could argue the same for the first McLuhan line, but you’d be on even shakier grounds, I think. My feeling is that these thats are non-restrictive relativizers. I’d be curious to know how you read them.

As good (as) or better than faulty parallelism

I read the following in a Discovery News article, and it gave me pause:

Fussy readers will frown at the faulty parallelism of “as much, or more, than…”. After all, we don’t say as much than. Strictly speaking, it would seem a second as is missing: as much as, or more than, the face.

This construction is sometimes called “dual comparison”, and it takes various forms: as good (as) or better than; as well (as) or better than; as bad (as) or worse than – you can add your own adjectives or adverbs to the formula. All are susceptible to the kind of casual ellipsis pictured above.

You may be wondering how acceptable the unparallel forms are: whether they’re OK in semi-formal contexts such as science news websites, for example. Let’s see what usage commentators have to say.

*

Bryan Garner says parallelism “helps satisfy every reader’s innate craving for order and rhythm”. He believes the second as “must appear”, and that dropping it is a “common error”. His appeal is to logic. This is also essentially the argument made by Robert Burchfield, who in his revised edition of Fowler says difficulties arise

because both bad and good (as well as other adjectives) obviously require as, not than, in comparisons. The juxtaposition of as and than without intervening punctuation is not logically defensible. Thus the sentence we’re sure they can judge a novel just as well if not better than us (London Review of Books, 1987) needs correcting to just as well as, if not better than, us.

Burchfield says a wiser course is to sidestep the problem by placing the comparative later in the sentence. So the LRB line could be recast thus: just as well as us, if not better.

But this is not the whole story; other authorities are less stringent. Kenneth G. Wilson’s Columbia Guide to Standard American English says the structure

is idiomatic, at least in Conversational levels and in their written representations, but Edited English avoids it because it is often criticized for its faulty parallelism. . . . Particularly in longer sentences, punctuation gets more complicated when you restore the as: He is as handsome and well-mannered as, or even handsomer and better-mannered than, his older brother.

I don’t see how the punctuation gets more complicated there, though: it’s just the usual two commas in a more unwieldy sentence.

The same source, in a separate entry, says that only crude faulty parallelisms usually bother us: “we speak and write a good many more that go unnoticed.” Unless we have that “craving” Garner mentions, I suppose, along with a meticulous reading and listening style.

The most thorough treatment I came across is in the exceptional Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage. It says the objections began (as they so often do) in the 18th century, beginning with George Campbell in 1776, and they have continued ever since:

This issue arises from the 18-century grammarians’ concern with developing a perfectly logical language – logical from the point of view of Latin grammar – and eliminating as many untidy English idioms as possible.

It says the locution might nowadays be considered “simply another idiomatic usage” had Campbell not noticed it, and that it is “a venial fault” since readers are not confused by it. After examining the various ways punctuation can affect the construction, MWDEU concludes that it “need not be routinely revised out of general writing that does not strive for elevation”.

A search on COCA suggests that as good or better than – seemingly the most common of these expressions – appears especially in magazines and newspapers, often as quoted speech. But academic occurrences are not unheard of, and for as well or better than are of comparable frequency. A few examples:

He knew the lawn as well or better than she did (Margaret Edwards, Virginia Quarterly Review, 1993)

they scored as well or better than the Swedes on tests of reproductive and contraceptive knowledge (Public Interest, 1993)

third-party settlement can be as bad or worse than negotiation in encouraging extreme claims and positions (Canada–United States Law Journal, 2000)

CPDT training is as good or better than the pre-service training (Education, 2003)

You can click on the following charts for more information on specific instances.

As good or better than:

As well or better than:

If on the other hand you are striving for elevation, and you want to attend to proper parallelism, you can:

1. Add as and use two commas.

2. Place the comparative later. This was Strunk’s preferred solution: My opinion is as good as his, or better / if not better.

3. Rephrase, e.g., at least as X as Y.

Different styles, tastes, contexts and hunches will call for different solutions, and it’s always good to have options.

A grisly crash blossom

What would you do to escape prosecution?

Crash blossoms, as you may know, are headlines that can lead you up the garden path, semantically speaking.

Today’s Irish Times has a mild one. The word to, commonly used in headlines to indicate futurity (as in the example above), here inadvertently generates an alternative meaning in which the Dutch TV presenters ate human flesh in order to escape prosecution.

It’s a wild idea.

The headline is unlikely to be misunderstood, but it has the potential to cause a momentary miscue — replacing to with will would avoid it — and it is grammatically interesting.

There are more crash blossoms here, at Language Log (including the recent gem “Does Donald Trump support matter?”), and on the Crash Blossoms blog.

You might could dig these multiple modals

A passage from Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress:

Joppy stopped wiping [the bar] for a moment and looked me in the eye.
“Don’t get me wrong, Ease. DeWitt is a tough man, and he runs in bad company. But you still might could get that mortgage payment an’ you might even learn sumpin’ from’im.”

That “might could get” was a serendipitous phrase to encounter. Over the preceding days I had come across several web pages on what are known as double modals or multiple modals, and had been considering a blog post about them. Hint taken.

First, a technical note on modals. These are a small and grammatically unusual family of verbs. They’re a subset of the auxiliary (helper) verbs and so are sometimes called modal auxiliaries. They qualify other verbs in a verb phrase, influencing the overall meaning: I can go, you may be, she must try. Geoffrey Pullum says there are 8–12 of them in English:

Too, it’s a strange usage

Reading John O’Brien’s Leaving Las Vegas, I was struck by the use of too in this passage:

Common wisdom would indicate that she should be a little apprehensive but her instincts tell her differently; this person wishes her no harm. Too, she hasn’t felt inclined toward apprehension lately. She has quickly faded into an observational fatalism — or is it bland apathy? She doesn’t really care.

Too is used this way — as a sentence adverb at the start of a clause — on at least one other occasion in the book. The usage has some currency: the Shorter OED has a line from Robert Ludlum (“Too, the windows were not that close to one another”), but I wondered how acceptable the language authorities consider it.

The American Heritage Dictionary (4th edition) says it “cannot be called incorrect, but some critics consider it awkward”. The Columbia Guide to Standard American English says it’s “rather stiff when compared with besides, moreover, also, and the like”.

Garner’s Modern American Usage finds there is “a tendency in facile journalism to use the word this way”, and recommends that we use also, and, or words such as moreover, further, and furthermore.

Lest the recency illusion take hold, I should point out that this is by no means a new idiom. Robert Burchfield, who edited the four-volume OED Supplement, says it had

a long and untroubled history from OE until the 17C. [...] at which point it became rare or obsolete, only to be revived in the 20C., chiefly in AmE.

Burchfield quotes several examples, including one from the New Yorker: “But, too, he was a charmer.” But is this usage a charmer? It’s certainly not wrong, but it sounds slightly strange to my ears, probably because I encounter it so rarely.

The last source I checked is the last I’ll quote from: the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage. Its inclusion of examples from the NY Times Magazine, Christian Science Monitor, Wall Street Journal and Sports Illustrated suggests that the idiom is seen principally in journalism, but I haven’t explored this in any depth.

the OED Supplement shows that such usage has been revived in the 20th century, originally in American English but now in British English as well. No grammatical objection can be made to it, and the practice is clearly standard. Whatever problems it causes have to do with idiom — which it to say that, because of its relative rarity, it sounds peculiar to some people.

This chimes with my own feelings about it. Whether or not to use it is a matter of style and personal preference. I don’t plan to adopt it in my own speech or writing, but I have no problems at all with its occasional appearance in my reading material.

How about you — do you ever use it, and how do you find it?

Rumble Tumble stumble

This guy Leonard knew sold cold guns was named Haskel Ward.

Did this line wrongfoot you? More than once?

It’s a great example of a garden path sentence, and one with multiple paths. It appears at the beginning of chapter 7 in Joe R. Lansdale’s novel Rumble Tumble, which I’m reading at the moment.

It boils down to “This guy was named X.” Inserting a relative pronoun or two —

This guy [who] Leonard knew [who] sold cold guns was named Haskel Ward.

— clarifies the syntax, but robs the line of its charm and of the narrator’s distinctive voice.

Dinosaur Comics, 25 November 2003

(If you’re a regular visitor here, you might remember seeing Rumble Tumble in this bookmash, where I found another use for its rhyming reduplication.)

That elusive non-restrictive ‘that’

Last month, I wrote about the unfounded “rule” limiting which to non-restrictive clauses and that to restrictive clauses. I hoped to show that restrictive which is common, standard, and unobjectionable, and has been for centuries. I’ve been updating the post with subsequent commentary from editors and linguists.

Restrictive which is ubiquitous, but non-restrictive that is very rare. MWDEU has several citations, including Shakespeare (“Fleance his son, that keeps him company”) and Oliver Goldsmith (“Age, that lessens the enjoyment of life, increases our desire of living”). The same source says the construction is used mostly by poets.

On Language Log in 2005, Geoffrey Pullum posted the following data from the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Note: integrated relative = restrictive; supplementary relative = non-restrictive).

The remarkable bottom-row figures will have caught your eye. Pullum describes finding a non-restrictive that as “like spotting the syntactic analog of an ivory-billed woodpecker”.

So you’ll understand why I felt a moment of excitement when I read what I thought was a genuine example in the wild: specifically, in The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald (chapter 34, “The Garden-House”):

Then as he dried himself he repeated, ‘Never does the heart sigh in vain, Justen,’ and she scarcely knew whether to be unhappy or not. In her mouth was something bitter, that tasted like the waters of death.

Reading it again, though, I decided it was more likely a restrictive clause, albeit one set off by an unusual comma. The comma supplies a pause, but it probably doesn’t mark a supplementary relative clause. That is, Fitzgerald’s line is equivalent to this:

In her mouth was something bitter that tasted like the waters of death. [restrictive]

and not this:

In her mouth was something bitter, which tasted like the waters of death. [non-restrictive]

What do you think?

Update:

My excitement has diminished as I’ve become more accustomed to seeing the construction. I recently read Anne Enright’s novel The Gathering, which has several instances of non-restrictive that. Here are two of them:

Ada bringing us for red lemonade into a pub, that had a black roof with huge letters of white written across it.

If Ada believed in anything she believed in this persistence, that other people might call the soul.

And another, this one from Obstinate Uncle Otis, a short story by Robert Arthur:

Maybe he thought he c’d ignore that lightning, like he ignores Willoughby’s barn across the road, or Marble Hill, that his cousin Seth lawed away from him so that now he won’t admit there is any such hill.

A recent post on Language Log has an example from a comic strip, while Alex Segal, in a comment, shares several examples of non-restrictive that and discusses their distribution and grammaticality.