Arne Olofsson

The Gift of the Gap: A Study of Dutch and Swedish Learners' Use of the English Zero Relativizer

Arne Olofsson is a Professor at the Department of English, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Zandvoort, 198. The passage refers to both zero relatives and the omission of the introductory word of thatclauses. It occurs in the Dutch-oriented version of R. W. Zandvoort’s book; the ‘‘language-neutral’’ version has ‘‘. . . sharply differentiating English from some other languages.’’ As for the structural description of this kind of relative construction, Zandvoort makes the puzzling claim that the antecedent has a function inside the relative clause: ‘‘In such cases the relation of the antecedent to the verbal predicate of the sub-clause may be that of a direct or indirect object, a prepositional object, a nominal predicate, or an adverbial adjunct.’’ His description of the example This is the man I gave the ticket to thus says that the man is the indirect object of the relative clause. This view of the zero construction remained unchanged through later editions, of which the sixth from 1972 (of the ‘‘language-neutral’’ version) is the latest one that has been available to me (and the latest one represented in Swedish libraries). Svartvik and Sager, my translation from Swedish. This work was Sweden’s most influential school grammar in the late twentieth century. The line quoted/translated is all they say (and need to say) about the zero relativizer. This is the term used by most modern reference grammars, e.g. Quirk et al., Grammar of Contemporary English; Quirk et al., Comprehensive Grammar; and Biber et al. Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum (1034) represent a different view, referring to zero as the absence of that in a non-wh relative. From a more historical perspective, Otto Jespersen (132–3) categorically rejects any description that uses concepts like ‘‘omission,’’ ‘‘subaudition’’ or ‘‘ellipsis.’’ His main reason seems to be a wish to defend what he calls ‘‘contact-clause’’ (a term referred to in a footnote in Huddleston and Pullum, 1034, as an equivalent to their ‘‘bare relative’’) as an independent primary construction. For a survey of terms for the construction as a whole used up to the mid1960s, see Rydén, 267. English Studies Vol. 90, No. 3, June 2009, 333–344