Talk:English relative clauses

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[edit] Undiscussed kinds

It seems like there are some kinds of relative clauses that aren't discussed here:

  1. Complete sentences, especially subjunctive-ish ones, used as relative clauses:
    • […] the age of 75 of my father, may he rest in peace, nor the age of […].[1]
    • Well... my husband, bless his soul, is a […][2]
  2. Relative clauses where the internal pronoun is not omitted:
    • [bad example removed, as it could be viewed as a normal relative clause]
    • Portman, who I wonder if she’ll ever better her role in Leon, is good here also, […][3]
    • The second message comes from a person who I don't know if the military is the right thing for them because they […][4]
  3. Reduced relative clauses — there are other ways to analyze these, but this is a common one:
    • […] cause death in a small child wearing a shoulder/lap belt, however, […][5]
    • [not a real example] The window, left open in an attempt to let in fresh air, had let in the rain as well.
  4. Fused/nominal relative clauses:
    • Will Scoble Do For Podcasting What He Did For Blogging?[6]
    • The Mafia will help whoever can pay.[7]
  5. Delayed relative clauses:
    • [not a real example] A woman introduced herself whose name I don't remember.
    • Something there is that doesn't love a wall, / […][8]
  6. Sentence-modifying relative clauses:
    • A judge rejected the claim, which is surprising since ’solidarity’ is […][9]
    • […] will prompt you to provide additional registration information, after which the information will be sent […][10]

Do any of these warrant mention in the article?

Ruakh 03:37, 13 November 2006 (UTC)


These are interesting, Ruakh. The last type, sentence modifying relative clauses, are important, and should certainly be in there. The rest is up for debate. I suspect that most of these are either not relative clauses in the traditiona sense (ror example I would see your "reduced relative clauses" as participle constructions, and the subjunctive "may he rest in peace" type are really interjections) or are just bad grammar, the results of people thinking on the hoof and producing spoken sentences which they would never write. Your "delayed relative clause" is a good example of this. Any native speaker who has thought about the sentence in advance would say "a woman, whose name I don't remember, introduced herself". But we don't plan sentences in advance in spoken language, so an afterthought gets tacked on the end and no-one cares that it is clumsy, we don't even notice until it is written down. --Doric Loon 09:33, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
So to summarize: #6 you think worth mentioning, the others not — #1 because you see such clauses as interjections rather than as relative clauses, #3 because you see such clauses as participle phrases rather than as relative clauses, #5 because you see such placements of relative clauses as ungrammatical, and #2 and #4 for unstated reasons? Ruakh 14:26, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Exactly, though #5 is really more clumsy than ungrammatical. In #2, I don't really understand how the child molester sentence is any different from any other relative clause, but the Portman sentence is ungrammatical because the who doesn't make sense as either subject or object of the verb. (The difference between #2(a) and #2(b) is that ask has quite a different valency from wonder.) #4 is similar to #6 and is worth including too: I actually thought this almost nominal use in the sense "that which" had been discussed in one of the wiki articles, but I can't find it now. So yes, please do write up #4 and #6. As for the others, I won't say don't mention them, but in the case of #1 and #3 you would need to find a source for some linguist who analyses them as relative clauses, because traditional grammar doesn't, and in the case of #2(b) and #5, you would want to say that these are non-standard occurrences which are observable as random variations in speech, and you would need to quote a real example of #5. --Doric Loon 16:37, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Re: #1: I always thought of them as relative clauses, but I don't know if that's a standard interpretation.
Re: #2(a): That's a good point; it's ambiguous between the two readings, and now that I think about it, your reading actually seems more likely. I've given a new, less ambiguous example.
Re: #2(b): You're right that it's not permitted by traditional grammar, but I'd hesitate to call it "ungrammatical" or a "random variation", as in my experience people produce it fairly often in certain contexts. There's no way for a relative pronoun to serve as the subject of an embedded clause that has an explicit complentizer or relative pronoun, so people often produce a relative clause with the "normal" pronoun re-inserted. For example, *"the woman, who I don't know who is, said she'd never come back" is impossible, so one common solution is to say ?"the woman, who I don't know who she is, said she'd never come back." Another is to do something like in #1: "the woman, I don't know who she is, said she'd never come back."
Re: #3: I don't think of them as relative clauses myself, but I know that to be a fairly standard way to interpret them; Googling "reduced relative clause", I find plenty of examples of this terminology: [11] [12] [13] [14].
Re: #4: Will do. :-)
Re: #5: This is comparatively difficult to find a real example for, since I can't think of any Google-searches that seem likely to pull up examples. (In the other cases, I tried various fragments that seemed relatively likely to occur in clauses of those types; but in this case, the clause is identical, simply postponed.) I'll see what I can do, though.
Re: #6: Will do. :-)
Ruakh 18:47, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

OK, I am now quite happy for you to include reduced relative clauses, though I think you should be careful to point out that this is not the only, probably not even the usual way to analyse them. If you can pin this analysis to one particular school of linguistics, that would be ideal. I still don't thik #2 is real English, though I acknowledge that the mangled sentences which we all sometimes produce when we aren't thinking clearly DO communicate and therefore are functionally real language and worth analysing. It would be interesting to know whether any of your special types are found in other languages, and how they are analysed there. Of course, #5 is perfectly normal in many languages; it is an oddity of English that we prefer the relative pronoun to be next to its antecedent. --Doric Loon 23:35, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Oh, I've thought of a real example of a delayed relative clause: the first two lines of Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall". Does that count? —RuakhTALK 05:17, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Grammatical gender

Check out Grammatical gender. English does have GG, however it is only reflected in pronouns; "who", "which", and "that" are clearly pronouns. "John" has a clear grammatical gender. GG does not have a 1-1 relation with biological sex, either, as there exist hermaphrodites, drag queens, etc., who challenge any concept of a purely biological gender. In any case, the usage of "who" mirrors the Dutch, which collapsed masculine and feminine into a common gender, and left the neuter gender alone. The former would take "who" as a relative pronoun, whereas the latter would take "which". samwaltz 17:09, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Ach, to quote briefly Gender, "In the social sciences, "gender" emphasizes a social, cultural, or psychological dimension, in contrast to biological sex. The discipline of gender studies investigates and theorizes on the nature of gender as a social construct." And yes, linguistics is a social science. samwaltz 17:14, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
You're right that he-vs.-she is actually a difference of sociocultural gender, not of strictly biological sex, but that's still irrelevant; it's not a difference of grammatical gender. Grammatical gender has to do with agreement — a noun has a specific gender if there are other words that have to agree with it in gender — but that's not the case in English. You seem to be under the impression that the choice between he and she has to do with the antecedent, but that's not true: it has to do with [the speaker's beliefs about] the referent. Consider the following exchange:
—That man over there with the red hair, what's his name?
—Uh … her name is Julie.
Now, an exchange like this is also possible in many languages that do have grammatical gender, because grammatical gender is often complicated by sociocultural gender; but in English it doesn't make sense to speak in those terms, because there's no case where grammatical gender "wins out" over sociocultural gender in determining agreement. (In languages that have grammatical gender, there are occasionally words that have a specific grammatical gender even when referring to someone of the opposite sociocultural gender, and a single entity might get different genders within the same sentence. This is impossible in English.)
—RuakhTALK 18:57, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
But words like "he" and "she" are not only reflective of grammatical gender, they have grammatical gender. We do not confuse "him" and "her" precisely because "he" and "she" have grammatical gender. Otherwise, it would be feasible to say "She is a great listener, which is why I like his company."
Of course, English also has a variety of positions (familial relations, professions, nobility, etc.) which have a distinct gender (father, princess, stewardess). The sentence "My father is coming over this weekend; she and I have a great relationship." is grammatically incorrect. I don't have to do a crotch check to know which pronoun to use; it is inherent in the noun. (And yes, I know a few people whose biological fathers are now female; in such cases, either a gender-non-specific noun, such as "parent" is chosen. Otherwise the sentence just feels as grammatically incorrect as a language with descriptive grammar will allow. samwaltz 19:32, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
Actually, no. Rosie O'Donnell once had a (rather tasteless) joke to the effect of "I dated a transsexual. It didn't work out: I loved him, but couldn't stand her." The joke is grammatically correct and completely understandable. The reason we don't confuse "he" and "she" isn't that they have distinct grammatical genders, but rather that they reflect different sociocultural genders, and sociocultural gender is a major element of our social structure, if not all social structures. (I'm sure you're aware of studies demonstrating that people never confuse a man with a woman, even though they can confuse very dissimilar men and very dissimilar women. The only characteristic that's nearly as salient is age: people don't confuse the young with the old, either.) The problem with "My father is coming over this weekend; she and I have a great relationship" is strictly semantic: "father" is only used with men, and "she" only with women, so they can't have the same referent. —RuakhTALK 00:38, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

I absolutely agree with Ruakh. There seems to be some confusion here about what grammatical gender means. It is gender as a characteristic or category of a noun which can be entirely independent of its semantics. The fact that gender-semantics are complicated does not make English gender concepts independent of semantics. But when German makes a knife neuter, a fork feminine and a spoon masculine, this is not confused gender-semantics, it is the total absence of gender-semantics. Gender has become a purely formal category. --Doric Loon 12:44, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

Hrm. Interesting. I'll be thinking about that for a while. Well, the page Grammatical gender is tagged as disputed/neutrality-check, so I don't mind letting go of that side fo the argument for a while. Could the term "sociocultural gender" be used in the article? In those regards, it would only be possible to use "who" as a relative pronoun for referents which typically take "he" or "she" as a subject pronoun? This, in fact, does not always concide with the humanness (humanity?) of the subject - it is perfectly acceptable to say "who" in reference to a klingon or other gendered mythological figure ("Our father, who art in heaven..."). I know, defining personhood is still generally in the realm of speculative fiction, so I can only rest on examples from the field, but again, referring to a robot as "he", "she", or "who" is usually related to its distinction from a dumb machine. Gender-attribution accompanies personhood in English. Whatever it is that "he"/"she" represents, whether grammatical gender, or sociocultural, is tied to our usage of "who". samwaltz 15:20, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

Oh! I see what you're saying. (Sorry, I got distracted by the grammatical-gender thing and missed the main point.) Yes, it's definitely the case that he and she are used to indicate personhood and it is used to indicate non-personhood (which is why it, while technically a gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronoun, is not even remotely serviceable in a sentence like, *"Someone forgot to write its name on its paper"). And yes, this is definitely analogous to the difference between human and non-human pronouns elsewhere. (BTW, science fiction and fantasy aren't the only homes for non-human he and she; people who deal a lot with animals often use those pronouns for them, and seamen often refer to ships with feminine human pronouns.) I'll edit the article accordingly. —RuakhTALK 19:32, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Masefield quote

How would you analyse this line: "And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by"? I remember a school teacher of mine parodying Dryden's relative clause rule by saying that if we were to follow that, Masefield would have to have written "And all I ask is a tall ship and a star by which to steer her." But while his parody obviously involves a relative clause, I'm puzzled about what exactly the original is. IS it a zero relative? --Doric Loon 08:33, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

No, not a relative clause, just a normal infinitival clause. As I'm sure you've noticed, infinitival clauses can follow their implicit subjects ("someone to watch over me") or their implicit objects ("something to do"); Masefield's example is the latter case. I happen to think "a star by which to steer her" sounds fine, but Fowler points out that since *"someone who to watch over me" and *"something which to do" are ungrammatical, it doesn't make sense to insist upon the analogous "a star by which to steer her". ("[…] Fowler considers 'a good land to live in' grammatically superior to 'a good land in which to live', since one cannot say *'a good land which to inhabit'."[15]) —RuakhTALK 20:10, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

Ah, thanks. The way the old rule was usually formulated was that one shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition (or as another parody put it: "a preposition is the very worst word to end a sentence with"), and it is only now that it strikes me that this is a far broader prohibition than just that they shouldn't end a relative clause. Course, no-one believes this rule nowadays anyway, but that doesn't stop it being interesting. --Doric Loon 16:59, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

P-stranding can also occur due to the fronting of a question word ("What is he talking about?"), or due to a passive-voice transformation ("That hasn't been talked about.") That said, saying it shouldn't end a sentence is neither broader or narrower; it forbids "That's something to think about", but permits "That's something we need to talk about, sir." :-P —RuakhTALK 19:01, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] POV Pushing: Which and That

My attempts to remove the unreferenced POV from the "Which and That" section keep being reverted. The edits should stand for the following reasons:

"This latter rule is a relatively recent invention" -- Both "relative" and "recent" are POV. Relative to what? Recent compared to what? All the reader needs to know is when and by whom the rule was recommended; let the reader decide for themselves if this makes it "relatively recent."
"as is still the case today." All this really says is that the editor who wrote this sentence agrees with Fowler's 1926 statement and thinks it is still true--hardly NPOV, and totally irrelevant to the article.

--Margareta 01:03, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure it's so POV as it is obvious and well known; but I think the current text (after your last edits) is acceptable. —RuakhTALK 02:21, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
I agree it would be correct to say that the convention is frequently disregarded--and in fact it would be easy to give a reference for such a statement (e.g., see the most recent Strunk & White). What was POV about the earlier wording was its assertion that neither most nor the best writers use the convention, as Fowler stated in 1926. I don't agree that this latter is "obvious and well known" today.--Margareta 01:36, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

I think it sounds ok as it is but just want to add a comment about "well-known". I'm British and an English teacher. Through years of teaching I had never come across this rule until MS Word grammar checker started objecting, and then a fellow Wiki editor "corrected" one of my edits. In fact, in British English, we use "which" in preference to "that" in formal texts, so the usage would be the exact opposite. I'll add that info. Gailtb 11:44, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Change of plan - decided not to add my comment about British English without a reference. Gailtb 11:46, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
There is actually already a comment in the section about the distinction between British and American English. And I liked your edits over in Restrictiveness.--Margareta 01:36, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

i am a native speaker of british english, and i have always used "which" far more than my current perhaps american influenced grammar text permits, so i was quite pleased to read the above. in any case i feel "which" is "better" very often as it suggests various choices, unspoken alternatives, whereas that also has meaning as an opposite to "this" where it is often used simply as a pointer i.e. "that is the door to the house" cf "there is the the door to the house" or indeed "that is the door which leads to happiness" here it is clear that "that" is primarily the pointer and "which" is the relating of the door to what lies beyond it, in other words other doors lead elsewhere. reversing the words gives "which is the door that leads to happiness" - on its own this has to be a question surely. and if it is a clause then in fact both orders or none will mean the same but there is a different emphasis. this is funny:-

-over there is the glass door, which is the door that leads to happiness
-over there is the glass door which leads to happiness - then talk of more doors
-over there is the glass door that leads to happiness - i think tends to be no more doors mentioned or relevant
or if they are the list is humdrum - that, that, that
-there is the glass door to happiness
-over there that is the glass door, which is that door which leads to happiness!!!!! etc etc

"that" is also less meaningful as both who and which can be substituted by it. i think i use "which" almost as much as i can; i tend to use "that" for clause substitution, however, ie "that's why i went there" cf "which is why i went there" perhaps because of the easier contraction with "thats"(!)?

well this is common usage type material, can anyone write something referenced to back this up or otherwise that could go on the page? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.27.221.233 (talk) 14:14, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Number

"If the machine reads what look like two answers."

or

"If the machine reads what looks like two answers."

Which is right and why? I think the first one is right because the antecedent to the word "what" is "answers" which is plural. My content editor says otherwise. Anyone know where I can find a legitimate source to prove one or the other right. Arthurian Legend (talk) 14:27, 14 April 2008 (UTC)