Talk:That

out of curiousity
is it grammatically allowed to have two that's? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Bud0011 (talk • contribs).
 * That makes "those". -Goldom (t) (Review) 05:34, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
 * sorry, i don't follow Bud0011 05:51, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

if you are talking about the word 'that', then cant you say 'That that'

If you are talking about a thing called 'That' that said the word 'that' then cant you say: That 'that', that that That said was 'that'.

There is more than one meaning of "that" - as a pronoun or to join two clauses together (eg. "I see that it's raining"). You don't need to quote "that" in order to have a grammatically correct sentence with two "thats" next to each other. Eg. I hope that that chicken is edible. If you think about the two "thats" in that sentence, you'll see they don't have exactly the same meaning as each other. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.109.27.34 (talk) 00:52, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Is "that" a very common word?
Like I said before, "that" is a very common word in the English language. Does anybody knows the question, "Is "that" a very common word?" ExpandD2003 (talk) 10:09, 17 March 2021 (UTC)

proximal versus distal.
The opening paragraph states: "it has proximal distance from the speaker", which seems mistaken to me. Later under Modern Usage, "the word is a distal demonstrative pronoun, as opposed to proximal" Shouldn't the first phrase read distal, if anything? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tsawangdorje (talk • contribs) 03:00, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Changed; the word was used colloquially. Urve (talk) 03:23, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Let's blow up the "Modern usage" section and start over
This article currently says in Wikipedia's voice: "That can be used as a demonstrative pronoun, demonstrative adjective, conjunction, relative word, and an intensifier", attributing this syntactic gobbledigook to a paper whose relevant part actually reads:


 * Arthur Sefton, writing over two hundred years [after Joseph Addison ], accepts that as a relative pronoun but instead objects to its use as an intensifier. He constructs sentence (2) to illustrate what he considers the 'legitimate' uses of that, as a demonstrative pronoun, demonstrative adjective, conjunction, relative pronoun and 'relative adverb' (the first that in his sentence).


 * (2) On the day that I came, I saw that that that that man did was wrong. (1984, Times Education Supplement)


 * The 'illegitimate' use of that, as an intensifier, occurs in expressions such as it's not that important: this use detracts, Sefton claims, from the two essential functions of that, which are 'to join and to demonstrate'. It is interesting that both these authors [sc Joseph Addison and Arthur Sefton] were as secure in their convictions as they were wrong on their facts: that as a relativizer predates the use of the wh- pronouns, and that as an intensifier has essentially the same function as when it is a demonstrative or a conjunction, as this paper will show. [my emphasis]

Blithely ignoring the fact that it's citing as some sort of linguistics insight what was apparently written in an unidentified issue of the TLS by one Arthur Sefton (who he?) and debunked in the very paper it cites, our Wikipedia article takes seriously Sefton's analysis for its section "Modern usage".

When I write above of syntactic gobbledigook, I mean that the analysis is to what is argued for (and not just proclaimed) in a good reference grammar (such as The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language) rather as a phrenological account of some psychological tendency is to what you'd find about the matter in a recent psychology text.

I propose not to improve the "Modern usage" section of this article but to delete it and start it again from scratch. OK? -- Hoary (talk) 00:22, 23 December 2023 (UTC)