It bothers me to see that used where who
is clearly called for, as in this excerpt from my bike club newsletter:
卼he driver that killed Bob?
Is there a rule for selecting the appropriate pronoun here?
JS
jskolnik@nycap.rr.com
Current descriptive grammars allow the relative pronoun that
to refer to a person, although certainly prescriptive grammars would
not recommend this. Information reported in Longman Grammar
of Spoken and Written English, by Biber, Johansen, Leech,
Conrad, Finnegan (Longman, 1999, pp. 609-612), shows that that,
as a subject relative pronoun used to refer to a human being, occurs
very
frequently in spoken language.
However, Longman Grammar also reports that, in news and in
academic prose, who is used far more frequently than
that.
The Grammar Book (Celce-Muria and Larsen-Freeman. Heinle and
Heinle, 1999, p. 582), states that 搮In informal conversational discourse,
that is often preferred over either which
or who(m). In written discourse, who(m)
is preferred for human antecedents??/p>
Some people feel that it is subtly dehumanizing to refer to a person
as that, and prefer who(m), even when
the person referred to is a killer driver.