That

Question

Is 'that' a relative pronoun? It is a fallacy that prolonged war will weaken an occupied enemy."Body of lies, movie

Teechr · Accepted Answer

Yes, it is. The sentence above is an example of a cleft sentence.

CalifJim · Answer

Tara2Is 'that' a relative pronoun?

No. There is no missing element in the clause (no gap item) where "fallacy" would fit.

'that' introduces a content clause. This sentence has "extraposed it". In other words, a dummy it replaces the whole subject (which is the that-clause), and the subject is moved to the end.

You might say that the original sentence is the one below, that is, the sentence before the components were rearranged.

[That prolonged war will weaken an occupied enemy]_subj is a fallacy.

Compare:

[That my hamster died]_subj is sad. > [It]_subj is sad that my hamster died.

CJ

BillJ · Answer

It is a fallacy that prolonged war will weaken an occupied enemy.

I agree with CJ.

"That" cannot be a relative pronoun here because the underlined element is not a relative clause but a subordinate content clause. And it's not a cleft construction either.

It's an extraposed construction where "it" is a dummy element serving the syntactic purpose of filling the subject position with the subordinate clause appearing at the end of the matrix clause in extraposed position.

The extraposed element doesn't give the meaning (reference) of "it" but serves simply as a semantic argument of the verb phrase.

The subordinate clause is marked by the subordinator "that", as is typically the case in declarative content clauses.

Note that the "that" which occurs in relative clauses is not a relative pronoun either but is also a subordinator -- the same one that occurs in declarative content clauses like the one in your example.

CalifJim · Answer

In summary, here's the disambiguation of several different constructions using the same basic sentences.

A prolonged war will weaken the enemy.
It is a prolonged war that will weaken the enemy. (it-cleft)
It is the enemy that a prolonged war will weaken. (it-cleft)

That a prolonged war will weaken the enemy is a common belief.
It is a common belief that a prolonged war will weaken the enemy. (extraposition)

The common belief that a prolonged war will weaken the enemy is a fallacy. (content clause; a complement to the noun 'belief')

This is a fallacy that people commonly believe. (relative clause; a modifier of 'fallacy')

CJ

That

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