The article I am about to review is titled “The function of the non-deictic ‘that’ in English”,

written by Michiko Yaguchi from Kobe city University of Foreign Studies. The article talks about
non-deictic ‘that’, which is known to be a non-obligatory element and thus is said to be often
deleted.
First of all, the author introduces the word ‘that’. According to him, it has various functions in
English: as a demonstrative, it is used as a pronoun, adjective, or adverb to point to an entity
deictically or anaphorically; as a conjunction or relative pronoun, that functions to connect two
clauses. However, the function of ‘that’ as a clause-connective word, is called the ‘non-deictic
that’ and is the primary focus of the article.
The most interesting phenomenon of this word for the author is that even without it, the
sentence is often well-formed. The article argues that non-deictic ‘that’ plays a significant
semantic and pragmatic role in English. Then the article introduces to us ‘that’ as a
complementizer, for example, “it’s likely that he was drunk”. Later the article moves on to
other uses of ‘that’. They are: appositive ‘that’, which is present in formal contexts, the relative
pronoun ‘that’ and the conjunctive ‘that’.
This article is full of useful information. It has managed to include not only the main topic, but
also the adjacent ones. As well as it managed to keep the language normal, so, readers do not
have to be experts to read it. That is why, I can recommend this article to anyone, who is
interested in the topic.