Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

The Development of Supposition Theory in the Later 12 th through 14 th Centuries 181
positing the case that every white man runs and there are many others
who do not run, the proposition ‘Every man who is white runs’ is
true, and is equivalent to: ‘Every white man runs’; but the proposition
‘Every man, who is white, runs’ is false, for it is equivalent to: ‘Every
man runs and he is white’. 30
In both English and Latin a restrictive relative clause immediately follows a common
term; the clause itself has the form of a relative pronoun followed by a full
proposition missing a denoting phrase. For example:
woman whom some man sees in the corner
consists of the common term ‘woman’ followed by the relative pronoun ‘whom’
followed by a partial proposition which is missing a denoting phrase: 31
some man sees in the corner.
Some examples of propositions containing complex terms with relative clauses are:
Some donkey which sees every animal kicks Socrates
Some donkey which every animal sees kicks Socrates
Socrates kicks some donkey which sees every animal
Socrates kicks some donkey which every animal sees
Although no detailed theory was given, it is apparent from writers’ usage (and from
inspection of natural language usage itself) that a whole complex phrase stands for
a thing x iff the modified term stands for it x and x satisfies the gappy proposition
that follows the term (with ‘x’ itself occurring in the gap). The complex term
‘woman whom some man sees in the corner’, stands for a thing x with respect to
a time iff the term ‘woman’ stands for x with respect to that time and some man
sees x in the corner with respect to that time.
2.7.2 Whiz deletion
Relative clauses often appear in reduced form; in addition to ‘Some donkey which
is seeing every horse is happy’ we have ‘Some donkey seeing every horse is happy’.
This happens whenever the initial relative pronoun is immediately followed by
the copula. This possibility is neatly captured by an old idea in transformational
grammar called “whiz deletion” (short for ‘wh- + is’ deletion). Specifically, this
30 Buridan SD 1.3.2 The last example he gives is discussed in Sherwood SW I.10, 28-29.
Sherwood explains the difference between the two types of relative clauses in terms of Aristotle’s
notion of “compounded and divided” in which the restrictive reading is the one in which the
clause is compounded with the modified noun, and the nonrestrictive reading is the one in which
they are divided.
31 The usual explanation for this is that ‘wh-’ originates within the propositional clause, and
moves to the front to become a relative pronoun, leaving a blank where it was. This explains why
relative pronouns get the grammatical case that a denoting phrase would have in the position
from which they move.