Understanding and using relative clauses
Using relative clauses often causes considerable concern for non-native speakers of English – so much so that they are often avoided completely. But they exist for an important reason; in English you cannot pre-modify important nouns very much – that is, you cannot place complex modifications before the noun. You have to put such modifications after the noun – and that is what relative clauses are for. In some languages, and Chinese is one, you can pre-modify a noun in an extensive and complex way but this is not possible in English as the following example shows:
Key noun |
relative clause |
main clause |
People |
who live in downtown areas |
are often very poor. |
The Chinese transliteration of this would be:
Adjectival clause |
key noun |
complement |
Live in downtown areas |
people |
often very poor. |
Avoiding the use of relative clauses in your writing will limit you to simple structures which are unlikely to be adequate to express complex ideas and which will detract from the overall style of your writing.
Relative clauses usually begin with the pronouns who, that, and which. These pronouns refer back to the key noun in a sentence. Look at the example:
Standard sentence: We call this fruit a lemon
Sentence with relative clause: This is the fruit that we call a lemon.
However, when the relative noun is not the subject of the relative clause, the pronoun is normally omitted. You can see that we is the subject of the relative clause, so it’s possible to omit the pronoun:
This is the fruit we call a lemon.
A clause with a deleted relative pronoun is known as a ‘contact’ clause.
'That' is usually less formal than who, which, etc.
For more information on relative clauses, see Murphy, R. (1988). English Grammar in Use. Cambridge: C.U.P. Look in Units 88 - 92. This book is available in CILL on the Grammar Shelf at Intermediate level.
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Last updated on 25 August 2011.
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