Who vs. That/ Where vs. That

Question

This is the teacher that we call "Hot Lips". This is the the place that we read many books.

The examples using that instead of who and where respectively are being taught. The pronoun that refers to the teacher and the place, yet my fellow instructor has continued allowing the students to use this relative-pronoun despite my advice.

Is there any way you could argue these sentences are grammatically correct?

I suppose you could take heart from the "accepted" answer on Should you use “who” or “that” when talking about multiple people doing something?, saying *Who refers to people. That and which refer to groups or things.. But bear in mind that more upvotes* went to the answer saying They are interchangeable. I don't think you'll find a lot of support for (largely, outdated) pedantry here. — FumbleFingers, Dec 08 '15 at 00:14
And the other question is addressed at Is a preposition of place required when replacing “where” with “that”?. But I don't think the answer given there is definitive.You can't say 'This is the room that we read many books', but place seems to have a grammar all of its own. 4 of the first 10 Google hits for "this is the place that we" have the 'that-for-where' usage (the rest being of the form 'this is the place that we call our home' etc). — Edwin Ashworth, Dec 08 '15 at 00:40

BillJ · Answer 1 · 2015-12-08T09:43:38.027

Who vs that

With human head nouns it's a free choice between wh-relatives and that-relatives: "the teacher who we call 'Hot lips'" and "the teacher that we call 'Hot Lips'" show no semantic differences, and no syntactic differences other than what follows from "that" not being a pronoun ("the teacher to whom the letter was sent" is grammatical but *"the teacher to that the letter was sent" is of course not).

Where vs that

"Where" and "that" are frequently interchangeable when the relativised word is an adjunct of place, as in "a place where/(that) you can relax". But in sentences with head nouns less likely to suggest location, a wh-relative would normally be required. For example "this is the article where the claim was made" is fine, but not *"this is the article (that) the claim was made".

Who vs. That/ Where vs. That

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