About the following sentence, my analysis of which you vehemently disagree with:
“Never mind that that taxation system would abolish other tax stratagems.”
I said in my reply to Miss Mae, who brought that sentence to my attention, that (1) its first “that” is a subordinating conjunction linking the main clause “never mind” and the subordinate or dependent clause “that taxation system would abolish other tax stratagems”; and that (2) the second “that” is a pointing adjective.
What, you ask, is the basis for my saying that the first “that” in that sentence is a subordinating conjunction?
We need to recognize first that the sentence in question is in the imperative mood. In such sentences, the person being commanded or asked to do something—in this case, “not to mind at all”* the thing referred to—is not identified but only implied, and the first-person entity doing the commanding is likewise not identified but only implied as well. This is a deep form of ellipsis, which is “the omission of one or more words that are obviously understood but that must be supplied to make a construction grammatically complete.”
Formally, however, the actual grammatical structure of that ellipted sentence is the following construction:
“I want you not to mind at all that that system would abolish other tax stratagems.”
Now we can clearly see that the sentence above is a complex sentence consisting of an independent clause and a subordinate clause. The independent clause is “I want you not to mind at all,” and it is linked by the first “that” to the subordinate clause “that system would abolish other tax stratagems.”
Seen this way, the first “that” in the imperative construction can only be a subordinating conjunction, indicating that what we have here is actually an ellipted form of a complex sentence in the imperative mood.
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* “Not to mind at all” is the smoother semantic equivalent of “never mind” when the imperative sentence is rendered in its full, unellipted form.
