That Explained

That is an English language word used for several grammatical purposes. These include use as an adjective, conjunction, pronoun, adverb and intensifier; it has distance from the speaker, as opposed to words like this.

The word did not originally exist in Old English, and its concept was represented by . Once it came into being, it was spelt as (among others, such as), taking the role of the modern that. It also took on the role of the modern word what, though this has since changed, and that has recently replaced some usage of the modern which.

Pronunciation of the word varies according to its role within a sentence, with a strong form, and a weak form, .

Modern usage

The word that serves several grammatical purposes. Owing to its wide versatility in usage, the writer Joseph Addison named it "that jacksprat" in 1771, and gave this example of a grammatically correct sentence: "That that I say is this: that that that that gentleman has advanced, is not that, that he should have proved." That can be used as a demonstrative pronoun, demonstrative adjective, conjunction, relative word,and an intensifier.

Historical usage

In Old English, that did not exist, and was only represented by . It originated in the north of England sometime before the 1200s and spread around the country in the thirteenth century; it then rapidly became the dominant demonstrative pronoun. Before the writings of Ælfric of Eynsham, was normally regularized as in writing, but by the time Ælfric lived, was common. As a pronoun, was widely used in Old English, though it was later replaced by wh- words. Where had only stood in for subjects of a clause, instead took on the role of both a subject and an object, and when and were both used, was always relative in orientation. The symbol ꝥ was used as an abbreviation, before it was phased out by the Romantic þt. Similarly, yͭ was a ligature to represent that, as seen in the gravestone of William Shakespeare: "". In Middle English, was entirely replaced by (among other representations), before again being replaced by the modern that. Among all relative markers in the English language, including who, which, whose, and what, that—through its ancient form of —appears to be the oldest.

In Old English translations of Latin (but only sparsely in original Old English texts), the phrase is frequently used—typically meaning "only"—but its origins and characteristics are not well-understood. Frequently, the construction of was in the original Latin, which referred then to a following clause. The use of was for cases in which there was exclusivity (to distinguish between general and specific objects), but translators also used it in situations where exclusivity was already given through other syntactical elements of the sentence. In these texts, seems to be used pleonastically (redundantly), and it began to be used as an independent adverb. In the context of weather events, was never used, such as in the example sentence (translated as "that rains").

Similarly, for several centuries in Old English and early Middle English texts, the phrase (translated as "among that") persisted. In the hundreds of years of its existence, it was used infrequently, though the usage was stable. Even in Old English, usage of ("while") was much more commonplace, with its frequency some six times as large as in a surveyed corpus. experienced grammaticalisation (turning a word into a grammatical marker), and as a result of its low usage, possibly underwent a period of specialization, where it competed with other grammaticalised phrases.

After verbs such as said, and more generally in introducing a dependent clause, contemporary English grammar allows the speaker to either include that or to omit it. This construction—as in "I suspect (that) he is right"—is called the zero form when that is not used. While there has been some analysis of the relative frequency of Old and Middle English usage of the zero form, these studies are of limited value, since they rely on unique text corpora, failing to give a general view of its usage. In the late period of Middle English, the linguist Norihiko Otsu determined, the zero form was generally as popular as the form in which that is included. The zero form was common in documents closely relating to speech, such as sermons, suggesting spoken English often omitted that in these contexts.

Pronunciation

That is pronounced either as (strong form) or (weak form) according to its grammatical role, with one as a demonstrative and the other as an anaphoric (referencing adverb). In this way, the strong form represents a determining pronoun (such as in "what is that?"), while the weak form is a subordinating word (as in "I think that it's a mistake").

The pronunciation of the voiced dental fricative pronounced as //ð// may vary, such as being stopped in Cameroonian English, resulting in a pronunciation of pronounced as /[dat]/.

See also

References

Works cited

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