Why is that used in the following sentence, instead of who?
Why was the girl that had plenty of money arrested for shoplifting
some trinkets worth only about two dollars?
Learn English – “Why was the girl that/who had plenty of money arrested”
dependent-clausesubordinate-clauseswho-thatword-choice
Related Solutions
Eve-teasing is a euphemism used in India. (Wiki)
A similar example is "ragging"- In the Indian sub-continent, “ragging” is actually the bullying of new college students.
In the Indian term “eve-teasing,” the word “eve” alludes to the biblical story of Eve tempting Adam to stray from the path of righteousness.
An Oxford English Dictionary definition for “teasing” is “to tempt someone sexually with no intention of satisfying the desire aroused.
Both parts of the term put the blame on the woman
terms enter a language with exposure to foreign culture.
- to me, it does not appear to be an agreeable word for a disagreeable act.
- common expressions (orthophemism) are: sexual harassment and molestation
This is an over-nested sentence, with centre-embedding (as opposed the left-embedding, which is also frequently problematic, or right-embedding, which is less difficult for English speakers). The problem is that the modifying phrases are embedded into the centre of the larger one, so the cognitive burden is too much for the reader, who is trying to hold all the open phrases in their short term memory.
One solution for this kind of centre-embedding is to concatenate the clauses to form a simple sequence or right branching structure* instead of nesting them:
So instead of:
The girl whose mother had brought a fresh tray of delicious lemon cookie bars to class a week ago wrote a book report.
We can write:
A book report was written by the girl whose mother brought a fresh tray of delicious lemon cookie bars to class a week ago.
(Huh, that turned out easier than expected; am I mis-emphasising/missing something? I know it's passive, but it's not creating a dangling branch that need filling, so it shouldn't be a problem...)
Alternatively, to borrow Stephen Pinker's example from A Sense of Style:
The view that beating a third-rate Serbian military that for the third time in a decade is brutally targeting civilians is hardly worth the effort is not based on a lack of understanding of what is occurring on the ground.
can be turned into the far more understandable, if clumsy:
For the third time in a decade, a third-rate Serbian military is brutally targeting civilians, but beating it is hardly worth the effort; this view is not based on a lack of understanding of what is occurring on the ground.
which can now be split into two or more individual sentences that flow with the context (whatever it originally was).
TL;DR: All kinds of tortuous, weirdly phrased sentences that don't seem to cohere can always be improved by drawing a syntax tree** to sort out what the underlying units are and fit them together in a way that readers will be able to parse.
*a phrase where the complicated embedded bit is at the very end, so that the reader has already parsed the rest of the sentence. In left-branching languages, the opposite is obviously true. Japanese is the canonical example of a left branching language, if you're curious.
**of whatever sort - no theoretical assumptions required :-) or, if that seems like too much effort, using coloured highlights to find the phrases and relations.
Best Answer
This response is actually directed to the comments that appear beneath waywardEevee's answer—and in particular to the OP's remark that "Why was the girl that had plenty of money arrested for shoplifting some trinkets worth only about two dollars?" was marked as the correct answer on a certification test for English teachers.
As John Lawler points out in his comments, claiming that either who or that is THE correct answer is arbitrary and ultimately baseless, since either word can validly be used to introduce the dependent clause "had plenty of money."
But whereas Araucaria sees the test designer's preference for that as perhaps striking a blow against an enforced blanket preference for who in all instances involving human referents (such as "girl" in the example sentence), I see it as a survival of another (and even older) arbitrary rule of usage that may be even less firmly connected to real-world usage. This rule asserts that that should be used to introduce all dependent clauses of the that/which/who type, whether the reference is to a person or to a thing; that who should be used only to introduce independent clauses that refer to a person; and that which should be used only to introduce independent clauses that refer to a thing.
Here, according to Frank Vizetelly, A Desk-Book of Errors in English: Including Notes on Colloquialisms and Slang to Be Avoided in Conversation (1908), is how the rule works in practice:
It seems to me that the test designers marked that as the correct answer in the sentence about the affluent shoplifter because they were enforcing the 1881 Alfred Ayers rule for dealing with that/which/who constructions—an exercise in grammatical atavism that no one ought to applaud.