|
Relative clauses. We have already seen that sentences can contain more than one independent clause when the added clause it joined on by a coordinating conjunction, conjunctive adverb, or subordinator. Clauses can also appear inside other clauses, in which case we may say that are embedded. One of the most common varieties of such clauses is the relative clause. Relative clauses are most often found following and modifying the head noun of a noun phrase, a postmodifier positon:
(1) The girl who is in the corner danced.(2) The man who was hit by the car laughed.(3) The team which was washing the car quit.(4) The wagon which is outside is broken.
Relative clauses usually begin with a relative pronoun. Like other pronouns, these have the same referent as a noun phrase-in this case, the one being modified. The noun phrases above are equivalent to saying:
(1a) The girl (the girl is in the corner)(2a) The man (the man was hit by the car)(3a) The team (the team was washing the car)(4a) The wagon (the wagon is outside)
If the relative pronoun is not the subject of the relative clause, it still gets moved to the front of the clause, so that the underlying meaning of sentence (5) would be something like sentence (5a):
(5)The girl whom I love(5a)The girl (I love the girl)
This is our old friend WH-MOVEMENT, the same process that English uses in making questions with interrogative pronouns (who, which, where, how, etc), which is not surprising, since the relative pronouns (other than that) also serve as interrogatives (question words). English uses WH-MOVEMENT wherever WH-pronouns occur.
Who/Whom. Like the personal pronouns I and me, the relative/interrogative pronouns who and whom are in the nominative and objective case respectively. Because "the girl" in a sentence like (5) above is the object of my affections in the underlying sentence, "whom" is considered proper in formal Standard English, as "Whom do I love?" would be considered correct as a question. In practice, this is another case where English is losing its inflections. In any but the most formal of situations, most speakers of Standard English would use "who" in both (5) and in "Who do I love?" Whom is mainly found when it is the object of a preposition and directly follows that preposition:
(6) I'm not sure of whom we are speaking.(7) These are details of which I am unsure.
Who/That/Which. An old school grammar rule still found in some handbooks tells us to use that only with inanimate objects, the same kind for which we would use which. This rules would have one use who or whom for all relative clauses modifying people and other animate beings. This rule is not accurate as a reflection of Standard English, which has always used that for both animate and inanimate objects. You might want to follow the old handbook rule when writing for teachers, who are not unlikely to have been taught it when they were in school. Following it will not result in any unacceptable sentences. Just do not judge others as incorrect if they use a sentence like this:
(8) The girl that I marry will have to be as soft and as pink as a nursery.
Whose. Who, which, and that are the main relative pronouns, but they are not the only ones. The possessive relative pronoun whose can be used in either the determiner slot, in which case its whole noun phrase moves with it, or as an independent possessive (like mine). In the sentence (9) below. the whose's function inside the relative clause is as an independent possessive. Much more common, though, is a sentence like (10), where whose is in the determiner slot. Whose can also be used this way with inanimate referents, as in (11), though it cannot do so when used as an interrogative pronoun. In these examples, whose heads non-restrictive relative clauses, but it can also head restrictive relative clauses, as in (12):
(9) He stole someone's data, whose I was not told.(10) Everyone turned to Mandy, whose degree was in English.(11) The facts, whose importance cannot be dismissed, suggest otherwise.(12) Police are looking for a driver whose car went through the restaurant window.
Prepositions and Relative Pronouns Whose and whom are on everyone's list of relative pronouns, and of whom (or of which) can serve as a more formal alternative to whose. (We can also use of whose.) Which and who/whom can be objects of other prepositions as well. Whether or not the prepositions are moved to the front of the relative clause by WH-movement depends in good part on how closely one feels them tied, if at all, to the verb. We'll discuss such links a little later. In the meantime, unless one is around purists who hate ending clauses with prepositions, sentence (13) below is an acceptable alternative to the more formal sentence (14). In each sentence, the which would have been the complement of at in the predicate of the relative clause before WH-MOVEMENT:
(13) The book which I was looking at proved useless.(14) The book at which I was looking proved useless.
Whoever etc. Lists of relative pronouns sometimes omit whoever, whomever, and whichever, perhaps considering them mere alternative forms. They are relative pronouns, in any case, and can head postmodifying relative clauses:
(15) The potion would make him love the user, whoever it might be.
Relative Trees. In our phrase structure trees, postmodifying relative clauses will be treated as part of that noun phrase. Instead of a PP (for prepositional phrase) under the N-bar part of the NP, we will have a CP (for complementizer clause). The results of WH-MOVEMENT are the same as for WH-questions, but this time there is a relative clause marker in the C element instead of a Q-Marker:
Just for the Record: Relative Adverbs. Other WH-pronouns occasionally head post-modifying clauses in noun phrases, particularly the clausal equivalents of place and time adverbs. The where in the following sentences can be called a relative adverb, since the clause it introduces takes the place of a place adverb like here.
(16) We went to the the place where he is buried.(17) This was in San Francisco, where I was born.
|
How Much of This Will be on the Test? This section is just the first of several dealing with relative pronouns and relative clauses. Most relative pronouns are used in other ways as well. You should soon be able to tell in what ways they are being used. |