Who, That:It’s All Relative

In the Beginning … What do two copy editors, one TESOL instructor, and one undergraduate

English major have in common?

– A thorough understanding, perhaps a hang up, on the “rules” of English grammar.

• As we were sharing our favorite grammar pet peeves, Amy mentioned the idiom “the one THAT got away” and how she thought it should be “the one WHO got away.”

• As our group thought about this, we recalled a simple prescriptive “rule” for relative pronouns: who is for people, that is for objects.

• We decided to pursue this further and posed several hypotheses.

Research Questions

1. Do students follow the rules of usage for “who” and “that”?

2. What is the current trend between who and that?

Survey of Literature• While we started out with a prescriptive rule in mind, we were quickly

reminded that rules are made to be broken and that language is infinitely more complex than a set a prescriptive rules.

• Jack Lynch and Edward Good agree with the “prescriptive rule,” but many sources do not espouse such a rule.

• For instance, In the oldest grammar guide we could find, written by Lindley Murray in 1808, stated, “Who is applied to persons, which to animals and inanimate things…” and “That, as a relative, is often used to prevent too frequent repetition of who and which”

• Leech and Svartvik write, “That is used with both personal and non-personal reference. However, it cannot follow a preposition, and is not usually used in non-restrictive relative clauses” (386).

• Furthermore, Paul Brians, author of Common Errors in English Usage, says, interestingly, “An aversion to “that” referring to human beings as somehow diminishing their humanity may be praiseworthily sensitive, but it cannot claim the authority of tradition. In some sentences, “that” is clearly preferable to “who…”

More History• The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English

Usage supports Brians’ opinion, saying, “that was the first relative pronoun, existing at least since Middle English. Which came next, followed by who(m); both already existed in the language, but only began to be used as relative pronouns in the 14th and 15th centuries”.

Revised Research Questions• With no hard and fast rule seemingly accepted,

we had to revise our third hypothesis.

1. Do students appear to follow any “rule” when using who and that?

2. What is the current trend in usage of these two relative pronouns?

Methodology

• Revised research question 1: “Do students appear to follow any “rule” when using who and that?”

• To examine this, we administered surveys to 93 students (77 Native English speakers and 16 Non-native)

Survey• Our survey questions were crafted to test different

aspects/conditions of the usage of “who” vs. “that.” • These included :

– Abstraction

– Identity

– Literature

– Idiomatic Expression

– & Testing Against a Rule

Survey• Our survey consists of 12 questions* and was

administered to 93 students • The students are pupils of Allen, Michael, and

Amy’s classes• Each question was chosen with an expected

answer, which made the results very interesting.

• Every question had the answer choices of either A. who or B. that

Survey (a few examples)

• Our first question came straight from L&S: – The workers _ were on strike made a deal

with their company.– A. 60 ~65%– B. 33 ~35%

Survey (a few examples)

• Question two came from The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, 1959

• “…Take while I’m in an offering mood. I’m not the Red Cross _ you can call at any emergency.” -Richler– A. 44 ~47%– B. 49 ~ 53%

Survey (a few examples)

• The third question also came from a work of literature. However, this work by Shakespeare is much older than the previous one, but that is once again the relative pronoun used.– “I’ll make a ghost of him _ lets me.”

Shakespeare, Hamlet– A. 71~ 76%– B. 22 ~ 24%

Survey (a few examples)

• Our fourth question is very interesting because it is an idiomatic expression– She is the one _ got away.– A. 51~55%– B. 42~ 45%

Survey (a few examples)

• Question five is another question that came from our L&S book– He is a guy _ always answers e-mail.– A. 66 ~ 71%– B. 27 ~ 29%

What does this tell us?

“While interesting, our survey data unfortunately contains mostly spurious results when testing for our first hypothesis. That is, if we use our control question as we intended (which sets a .06 significance level), a question would need to have 94% of the responses to count as significant, to show students are making a certain choice because of a prescriptive rule, [which did not happen]…. Not finding a pattern, however, only reifies our conclusion from our survey of literature: if there is a rule, it is the minority, not the majority, who chose to follow it consistently.”

Methodology

• Research question 2: “What is the current trend in usage of these two relative pronouns?”

• To look at the current trends with these two, we used COCA

Survey (a few examples)• Abstraction & Identity

# Question StudentResponses

% COCAtokens

1. Who The workers _ were on strike made a deal with their company.

60 65 161That 33 35 21

7. Who I’m a person _ loves babies. 60 65 2806That 33 35 395

8. Who I don’t trust people _ hate babies.

40 43 72857That 53 57 14285

Survey (a few examples)• Idiomatic Expression

# Question StudentResponses

% COCAtokens

4. Who She is the one _ got away

51 55% 12

That 42 45% 48

Survey (a few examples)• Testing Against a Rule# Question Student

Responses % COCA

tokens5. Who He is a guy _ always

answers e-mail. 66 71% 3425That 27 29% 522

6. Who In my English class, we are reading authors _ nobody’s ever read.

25 27% 295That 68 73% 58

Post Facto Interest

• After we had collected and analyzed the data for our first 2 hypotheses, we returned to something that piqued our interest in the survey of literature: the historical relationship between who and that.

Google Ngram of Historical Relationship

“Person who” vs. “Person that”

So What?

This MAY relate to the Industrial Revolution, the boom in education, and grammars like Murray’s (which become hyper-rule based when taught,

creating the “strict form” of who=people and that=objects). But an extensive investigation of this

issue is beyond the scope of our paper.

Conclusion