41
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by PlogLod@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

How do you say something like that?

"There's a thing for which I don't know what it is" "There's a thing where I don't know what it is" "There's a thing that I don't know what is"

or (the one which I hear people say a lot but sounds awkward:) "There's a thing that/which I don't know what it is"?

To be honest they all sound awkward to me to varying degrees

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] pruwybn@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 1 year ago

This is a great question, and it led me down a bit of a rabbit hole. This kind of clause is called a Gapless Relative Clause. The sentence could be written as you have it, or with "I don't know what it is" - the "it" is called the Resumptive Pronoun which are "common in spoken English but are officially ungrammatical".

The Wikipedia article has a similar example:

In other cases, the resumptive pronoun is used to work around a syntactic constraint:

They have a billion dollars of inventory that they don't know where it is.

In this example, the word it occurs as part of a wh-island. Attempting to extract it gives an unacceptable result:

*They have a billion dollars of inventory that they don't know where ___ is.

Here's another great article I found which sums it up well:

"Resumptives are non-standard, but in such cases they're much better than their gapped counterparts, which people usually find incomprehensible, or at least very hard to comprehend."

So basically, your original sentence is "unacceptable"/"incomprehensible", but adding "it" would be grammatically incorrect but easier to understand. Best bet is probably to totally rephrase the sentence as others have suggested.

this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
41 points (93.6% liked)

Asklemmy

43750 readers
1264 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS