Judgment Tests

[Herr Dunkel]

"That's the kind of thing [that] people would find weird if they saw you doing."

Is that bolded bit grammatical for you? It's the first thing my brain came up with, but for some reason it rings false, even though I can't come up with a better way of saying it.

Perfectly grammatical.
Far more than with "it"

[jal]

How do you make -ly adjectives into adverbs, e.g. friendly, silly?
My usual cop-out is "in a ___ manner/way", but that sort of circumlocution can get quite tiring.

You are someone who says "fastly"?

I don't think anyone says that. Just fast or quick in lieu of quickly.

QED :).


JAL

[Bedelato]

"That's the kind of thing [that] people would find weird if they saw you doing."

Is that bolded bit grammatical for you? It's the first thing my brain came up with, but for some reason it rings false, even though I can't come up with a better way of saying it.

Also, can silly be made into an adverb (i.e. is sillily grammatical)? It's in the Wiktionary category for "dated English words," and it sounds kind of funny to me, anyways. If not, would you express it periphrastically (like in a silly way)?

No. The sentence as written is not grammatical for me.

You'd have to add a pronoun at the end:
"That's the kind of thing that people would find weird if they saw you doing it."
Or reorder the sentence entirely:
"People would find it weird if they saw you doing that kind of thing."

As for the adverbs, *"sillily" is not something I'd say. "Silly" by itself as an adverb (?"He walks silly") sounds strange, but it's not downright ungrammatical. "He walks funny" is what I'm more likely to say.

[brandrinn]

The sentence is grammatical for me, because when you construct a relative clause with "that" (or implied "that"), there is going to be a missing pronoun somewhere. The reason it sounds weird to some people on this board is because the pronoun that gets omitted has to be deleted from two places in the sentence. So once the first "it" is skipped over, your brain says "There, now we're done with the omitted pronoun, and we can move on to... wait a minute, what's this? A missing pronoun? You can't omit pronouns in English! Just what do you think you're doing, sentence?" I think the "official" rule would be to just omit the pronoun twice, but I suspect most people would only feel comfortable omitting it the first time, and including it the second time, even though it's the same pronoun that is being replaced by the word "that."

Incidentally, my own dialect (GA in the Piedmont region of the South) has an interesting innovation where a sentence will start with something along the lines of "That's the person who..." and then there will be a relative clause that could easily stand as its own perfectly grammatical sentence because nobody can figure out which pronoun "who" is standing in for, or because paraphrasing would sound awkward. "That's the person who she didn't like him," and that sort of thing.

[Boşkoventi]

The sentence is grammatical for me, because when you construct a relative clause with "that" (or implied "that"), there is going to be a missing pronoun somewhere. The reason it sounds weird to some people on this board is because the pronoun that gets omitted has to be deleted from two places in the sentence. So once the first "it" is skipped over, your brain says "There, now we're done with the omitted pronoun, and we can move on to... wait a minute, what's this? A missing pronoun? You can't omit pronouns in English! Just what do you think you're doing, sentence?" I think the "official" rule would be to just omit the pronoun twice, but I suspect most people would only feel comfortable omitting it the first time, and including it the second time, even though it's the same pronoun that is being replaced by the word "that."

Actually, I think the problem is ultimately the "if" clause. Notice what I said - "if" clause. Some people parse it as part of the relative clause, some don't:

That's the kind of thing ( [that] people would find ___ weird (if they saw you doing ___) ).

That's the kind of thing ( [that] people would find ___ weird ) ( if they saw you doing it ).

The first version seems to treat the "if" clause as a restricting element (cf. restrictive relative clauses). In the second version, "it" can't be omitted because it's not part of the relative clause. You could think of the "if" clause as a sort of after thought:

That's the kind of thing [that] people would find weird, if they saw you doing it.

And this sentence isn't relevant, since it lacks an "if" clause (or any other extra clause):

That's the sort of thing people would judge you for saying/doing/eating/etc.

Note how there's only one original pronoun to be omitted:

People would judge you for saying/doing/eating/etc. that.

[din]

How do you make -ly adjectives into adverbs, e.g. friendly, silly?
My usual cop-out is "in a ___ manner/way", but that sort of circumlocution can get quite tiring.

I'm not afraid of 'sillily'

[bulbaquil]

How do you make -ly adjectives into adverbs, e.g. friendly, silly?
My usual cop-out is "in a ___ manner/way", but that sort of circumlocution can get quite tiring.

Generally, I employ synonyms.

friendly = ami(c)able --> ami(c)ably
silly = ridiculous (usually) --> ridiculously

[brandrinn]

Actually, I think the problem is ultimately the "if" clause. Notice what I said - "if" clause. Some people parse it as part of the relative clause, some don't:

But in what dialect would it ever be even remotely acceptable to take the if clause out of the relative clause? That's a thousand times more ungrammatical than inserting unnecessary pronouns. We should make another thread to mock the troglodytes who can't parse relative clauses properly.