What does "that" mean in the sentences below.
Please tell me what that means in the sentences below. Is it an adverb? Does it emphasize the word"early"?
Dr. Atkinson, an expert at applying mathematical methods to linguistics,
has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken
throughout the world: A language area uses fewer phonemes the farther
that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it. Some of the click-using
languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, whereas Hawaiian,
toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13.
English has about 45 phonemes.
Top answer
It's a rather awkward sentence. "
- It's a rather awkward sentence.
- "
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It's a rather awkward sentence.
"That" is a relative pronoun introducing a clause that modifies "the farther (the distance)."
0A language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it.
I'd say this was a correlative comparative construction. It becomes clearer if the subordinate clause is fronted:
The further that early human beings had to travel from Africa to reach a language area, the fewer phonemes
0
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