I don't see why you're so confident that this is a mistake, and why you think it's easy for people to "avoid making it".
I agree "it would be idle to pretend that it is the practice either of most or of the best writers," and so speakers of english grow up in an environment where there is not a regular correspondence between that/which and restrictive/non-restrictive clauses. Rather I think the clearest signal is a pause and inflectional marking (in speech) or a comma in writing.
I certainly don't generally mind reading writing in which the author carefully sticks to "which" for non-restrictive and "that" for restrictive, and I suppose an extra redundant signal of restrictivity is fine, but I never recall having a problem understanding sentences that use "which" restrictively --- they just sound a little more british to my dialect-sense, but that particular judgment may be spurious.
An example where the use of restrictive which seems downright necessary to accept as legal to me is when the demonstrative pronoun is followed by a relative: consider the title of Basitat's essay "That which is seen, and that which is not seen." Surely we are not supposed to say "That that is seen, and that that is not seen," are we?
Given this --- and moreover the existence phrasal relativizers like "in which" that undeniably use at least the token "which" in a restrictive way, and certainly have no whichless substitute --- why perpetuate the myth that consistently using which and that nonrestrictively and restrictively actually achieves much in the way of consistency and clarity?
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krja
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-21 02:33 am (UTC)I agree "it would be idle to pretend that it is the practice either of most or of the best writers," and so speakers of english grow up in an environment where there is not a regular correspondence between that/which and restrictive/non-restrictive clauses. Rather I think the clearest signal is a pause and inflectional marking (in speech) or a comma in writing.
I certainly don't generally mind reading writing in which the author carefully sticks to "which" for non-restrictive and "that" for restrictive, and I suppose an extra redundant signal of restrictivity is fine, but I never recall having a problem understanding sentences that use "which" restrictively --- they just sound a little more british to my dialect-sense, but that particular judgment may be spurious.
An example where the use of restrictive which seems downright necessary to accept as legal to me is when the demonstrative pronoun is followed by a relative: consider the title of Basitat's essay "That which is seen, and that which is not seen." Surely we are not supposed to say "That that is seen, and that that is not seen," are we?
Given this --- and moreover the existence phrasal relativizers like "in which" that undeniably use at least the token "which" in a restrictive way, and certainly have no whichless substitute --- why perpetuate the myth that consistently using which and that nonrestrictively and restrictively actually achieves much in the way of consistency and clarity?