A relative clause is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun phrase, most commonly a noun. For example, the phrase "the man who wasn't there" contains the noun man, which is modified by the relative clause who wasn't there. A relative clause can also modify a pronoun, as in "he to whom I have written", or a noun phrase which already contains a modifier, as in "the black panther in the tree, which is about to pounce". The complete phrase (modified noun phrase plus modifying relative clause) is also a noun phrase.
In many European languages, relative clauses are introduced by a special class of pronouns called relative pronouns; in the previous example, who is a relative pronoun. In other languages, relative clauses may be marked in different ways: they may be introduced by a special class of conjunctions called relativizers; the main verb of the relative clause may appear in a special morphological variant; or a relative clause may be indicated by word order alone. In some languages, more than one of these mechanisms may be possible.
A relative clause is always used to join together two sentences that share one of their arguments. For example, the sentence "The man that I saw yesterday went home" is equivalent to the following two sentences: "The man went home. I saw the man yesterday." In this case, "the man" occurs as argument to both sentences. Note that there is no requirement that the shared argument fulfills the same role in both of the joined sentences; indeed, in this example, "the man" is subject of the first, but direct object of the second.
The two sentences joined in a relative-clause construction are known as the main clause or matrix clause (the outer clause) and the embedded clause or relative clause (the inner clause). The shared noun as it occurs in the main clause is termed the head noun. Languages differ in many ways in how relative clauses are expressed:
For example, the English sentence "The man that I saw yesterday went home" can be described as follows:
The following sentences indicate various possibilities (only some of which are grammatical in English):
There are four main strategies for indicating the role of the shared noun phrase in the embedded clause. These are typically listed in order of the degree to which the noun in the relative clause has been reduced, from most to least:
In this strategy, there is simply a gap in the relative clause where the shared noun would go. This is normal in English, for example, and also in Chinese and Japanese. This is the most common type of relative clause, especially in verb-final languages with prenominal relative clauses, but is also widespread among languages with postnominal externally headed relative clauses.
There may or may not be any marker used to join the relative and main clauses. (Note that languages with a case-marked relative pronoun are technically not considered to employ the gapping strategy even though they do in fact have a gap, since the case of the relative pronoun indicates the role of the shared noun.) Often the form of the verb is different from that in main clauses and is to some degree nominalized, as in Turkish and in English reduced relative clauses.[1][2]
In non-verb-final languages, apart from languages like Thai and Vietnamese with very strong politeness distinctions in their grammars, gapped relative clauses tend however to be restricted to positions high up in the accessibility hierarchy. With obliques and genitives, non-verb-final languages that do not have politeness restrictions on pronoun use tend to use pronoun retention. English is unusual in that all roles in the embedded clause can be indicated by gapping: e.g. "I saw the man who is my friend", but also (in progressively less accessible positions cross-linguistically, according to the accessibility hierarchy described above) "... who I know", "... who I gave a book to", "... who I spoke with", "... who I run slower than". Usually, languages with gapping disallow it beyond a certain level in the accessibility hierarchy, and switch to a different strategy at this point. Classical Arabic, for example, only allows gapping in the subject and sometimes the direct object; beyond that, a resumptive pronoun must be used. Some languages have no allowed strategies at all past a certain point — e.g. in many Austronesian languages, such as Tagalog, all relative clauses must have the shared noun serving the subject role in the embedded clause. In these languages, relative clauses with shared nouns serving "disallowed" roles can be expressed by passivizing the embedded sentence, thereby moving the noun in the embedded sentence into the subject position. This, for example, would transform "The man who I gave a book to" into "The man who was given a book by me". Generally, languages such as this "conspire" to implement general relativization by allowing passivization from all positions – hence a sentence equivalent to "The man who is run slower than by me" is grammatical. Note also that gapping is often used in conjunction with case-marked relative pronouns (since the relative pronoun indicates the case role in the embedded clause), but this is not necessary (e.g. Chinese and Japanese both using gapping in conjunction with an indeclinable complementizer).
This is in fact a type of gapped relative clause, but is distinguished by the fact that the role of the shared noun in the embedded clause is indicated indirectly by the case marking of the marker (the relative pronoun) used to join the main and embedded clauses. All languages which use relative pronouns have them in clause-initial position: though one could conceivably imagine a clause-final relative pronoun analogous to an adverbial subordinator in that position, they are unknown.
Note that some languages have what are described as "relative pronouns" (in that they agree with some properties of the head noun, such as number and gender) but which don't actually indicate the case role of the shared noun in the embedded clause. Classical Arabic in fact has "relative pronouns" which are case-marked, but which agree in case with the head noun. Case-marked relative pronouns in the strict sense are almost entirely confined to European languages, where they are widespread except among the Celtic family and Indo-Aryan family. The influence of Spanish has led to their adaption by a very small number of Native American languages, of which the best-known are the Keresan languages.[3]
In this type, the position relativised is indicated by means of a personal pronoun in the same syntactic position as would ordinarily be occupied by a noun phrase of that type in the main clause — known as a resumptive pronoun. It is equivalent to saying "The man who I saw him yesterday went home". Pronoun retention is very frequently used for relativization of inaccessible positions on the accessibility hierarchy. In Persian and Classical Arabic, for example, resumptive pronouns are required when the embedded role is other than the subject or direct object, and optional in the case of the direct object. Resumptive pronouns are common in non-verb-final languages of Africa and Asia, and also used by the Celtic languages of northwest Europe and Romanian ("Omul pe care l-am văzut ieri a mers acasă"/"The man who I saw him yesterday went home"). They also occur in deeply embedded positions in English, as in "That's the girl that I don't know what she did",[4] although this is sometimes considered non-standard.
Only a very small number of languages, of which the best known is Yoruba, have pronoun retention as their sole grammatical type of relative clause.
In the nonreduction type, unlike the other three, the shared noun occurs as a full-fledged noun phrase in the embedded clause, which has the form of a full independent clause. Typically, it is the head noun in the main clause that is reduced or missing. Some languages use relative clauses of this type with the normal strategy of embedding the relative clause next to the head noun. These languages are said to have internally headed relative clauses, which would be similar to the (ungrammatical) English structure "[You see the girl over there] is my friend" or "I took [you see the girl over there] out on a date". This is used, for example, in Navajo, which uses a special relative verb (as with some other Native American languages).
A second strategy is the correlative-clause strategy used by Hindi and other Indo-Aryan languages, as well as Bambara. This strategy is equivalent to saying "Which girl you see over there, she is my daughter" or "Which knife I killed my friend with, the police found that knife". It is "correlative" because of the corresponding "which ... that ..." demonstratives or "which ... she/he/it ..." pronouns, which indicate the respective nouns being equated. Note that the shared noun can either be repeated entirely in the main clause or reduced to a pronoun. Note also that there is no need to front the shared noun in such a sentence. For example, in the second example above, Hindi would actually say something equivalent "I killed my friend with which knife, the police found that knife".
Dialects of some European languages, such as Italian, do use the nonreduction type in forms that could be glossed in English as "The man just passed us by, he introduced me to the chancellor here." Similarly, spoken English tends to replace uses of the relative pronoun whose with non-reduced clauses. For example, consider the following sentence:
Informal English would tend to say instead
In general, however, nonreduction is restricted to verb-final languages, though it is more common among those that are head-marking.
The following are some of the common strategies for joining the two clauses:
The positioning of a relative clause before or after a head noun is related to the more general concept of branching in linguistics. Languages that place relative clauses after their head noun (so-called head-initial or VO languages) generally also have adjectives and genitive modifiers following the head noun, as well as verbs preceding their objects. French, Spanish and Arabic are prototypical languages of this sort. Languages that place relative clauses before their head noun (so-called head-final or OV languages) generally also have adjectives and genitive modifiers preceding the head noun, as well as verbs following their objects. Turkish and Japanese are prototypical languages of this sort. Not all languages fit so easily into these categories. English, for example, is generally head-first, but has adjectives preceding their head nouns, and genitive constructions with both preceding and following modifiers ("the friend of my father" vs. "my father's friend"). Chinese has the VO order, with verb preceding object, but otherwise is generally head-final.
Various possibilities for ordering are:
The antecedent of the relative clause (that is, the noun that is modified by it) can in theory be the subject of the main clause, or its object, or any other verb argument. In many languages, however, especially rigidly left-branching, dependent-marking languages with prenominal relative clauses,[5] there are major restrictions on the role the antecedent may have in the relative clause.
Edward L. Keenan and Bernard Comrie noted that these roles can be ranked cross-linguistically in the following order from most accessible to least accessible:[6][7]
Ergative-absolutive languages have a similar hierarchy:
This order is referred to as the accessibility hierarchy. If a language can relativize positions lower in the accessibility hierarchy, it can always relativize positions higher up, but not vice versa. For example, Malagasy can relativize only subject and Chukchi only absolutive arguments, whilst Basque can relativize absolutives, ergatives and indirect objects, but not obliques or genitives or objects of comparatives. Similar hierarchies have been proposed in other circumstances, e.g. for pronominal reflexes.
English can relativize all positions in the hierarchy. Here are some examples of the NP and relative clause usage from English:
| Position | With explicit relative pronoun | With omitted relative pronoun | In formal English |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subject | That’s the man [who ran away]. | — | That’s the man [who ran away]. |
| Direct object | That’s the man [who I saw yesterday]. | That's the man [I saw yesterday]. | That’s the man [whom I saw yesterday]. |
| Indirect object | That’s the man [who I gave the letter to]. | That’s the man [I gave the letter to]. | That’s the man [to whom I gave the letter]. |
| Oblique | That’s the man [who I was talking about]. | That’s the man [I was talking about]. | That’s the man [about whom I was talking]. |
| Genitive | That’s the man [whose sister I know]. | — | That’s the man [whose sister I know]. |
| Obj of Comp | That’s the man [who I am taller than]. | That’s the man [I am taller than]. | That’s the man [than whom I am taller]. |
Some other examples:
| Position | Example |
|---|---|
| Subject | The girl [who came late] is my sister. |
| Direct object | I gave a rose to the girl [that Kate saw]. |
| Indirect object | John knows the girl [I wrote a letter to]. |
| Oblique | I found the rock [which the robbers had hit John over the head with]. |
| Genitive | The girl [whose father died] told me she was sad. |
| Obj of Comp | The first person [I can't run faster than] will win a million dollars. |
Languages which cannot relativize directly on noun phrases low in the accessibility hierarchy can sometimes use alternative voices to "raise" the relevant noun phrase so that it can be relativized. The most common example is the use of applicative voices to relativize obliques, but in such languages as Chukchi antipassives are used to raise ergative arguments to absolutive.
For example, a language that can relativize only subjects could say this:
But not:
These languages might form an equivalent sentence by passivization:
Note that these passivized sentences get progressively more ungrammatical in English as they move down the accessibility hierarchy; the last two, in particular, are so ungrammatical as to be almost unparsable by English speakers. However, those languages with severe restrictions on which roles can be relativized are precisely those that can passivize almost any position, and hence the last two sentences would be normal in these languages.
A further example is languages that can relativize only subjects and direct objects. Hence the following would be possible:
However, the other ungrammatical examples above would still be ungrammatical. These languages often allow an oblique object to be moved to the direct object slot by the use of the so-called applicative voice, similar to how the passive voice moves an oblique object to the subject position. The above examples expressed in an applicative voice might be similar to the following (in not necessarily grammatical English):
Modern grammars may use the accessibility hierarchy to order productions — e.g. in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar the hierarchy corresponds to the order of elements on the subcat list, and interacts with other principles in explanations of binding facts. The hierarchy also figures in Lexical Functional Grammar where it is known as Syntactic Rank or the Relational Hierarchy.
In English, a relative clause follows the noun it modifies. It is generally indicated by a relative pronoun at the start of the clause, although sometimes simply by word order. If the relative pronoun is the object of the verb in the relative clause, it comes at the beginning of the clause even though it would come at the end of an independent clause ("He is the man whom I saw", not "He is the man I saw whom").
The choice of relative pronoun can be affected by whether the clause modifies a human or non-human noun, by whether the clause is restrictive or not, and by the role (subject, direct object, or the like) of the relative pronoun in the relative clause.
In English, as in some other languages (such as French; see below), non-restrictive relative clauses are set off with commas, but restrictive ones are not:
As regards relative clauses, English has two particularities that are unique among the Germanic languages:
The status of "that" as a relative pronoun is not universally agreed. Traditional grammars treat "that" as a relative pronoun, but not all contemporary grammars do: e.g. the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (pp. 1056–7) makes a case for treating "that" as a subordinator instead of a relative pronoun; and the British National Corpus treats "that" as a subordinating conjunction even when it introduces relative clauses. One motivation for the different treatment of "that" is that there are differences between "that" and "which" (e.g., one can say "in which" but not "in that", etc.).
The system of relative pronouns in French is as complicated as, but similar in many ways to, the system in English.
When the pronoun is to act as the direct object of the relative clause, que is generally used, although lequel, which is inflected for grammatical gender and number, is sometimes used in order to give more precision. For example, any of the following is correct and would translate to "I talked to his/her father and mother, whom I already knew":
However, in the first sentence, "whom I already knew" refers only to the mother; in the second, it refers to both parents; and in the third, as in the English sentence, it could refer either only to the mother, or to both parents.
When the pronoun is to act as the subject of the relative clause, qui is generally used, though as before, lequel may be used instead for greater precision. (This is less common than the use of lequel with direct objects, however, since verbs in French often reflect the grammatical number of their subjects.)
When the pronoun is to act in a possessive sense, where the preposition de (of/from) would normally be used, the pronoun dont ("whose") is used, but does not act as a determiner for the noun "possessed":
This construction is also used in non-possessive cases where the pronoun replaces an object marked by de:
More generally, in modern French, dont can signal the topic of the following clause, without replacing anything in this clause:
When the pronoun is to act as the object of a preposition (other than when dont is used), lequel is generally used, though qui can be used if the antecedent is human. The preposition always appears before the pronoun, and the prepositions de and à (at/to) contract with lequel to form duquel and auquel, or with lesquel(le)s to form desquel(le)s and auxquel(le)s.
Aside from their highly inflected forms, German relative pronouns are less complicated than English. There are two varieties. The more common one is based on the definite article der, die, das, but with distinctive forms in the genitive (dessen, deren) and in the dative plural (denen). Historically this is related to English that. The second, which is more literary and used for emphasis, is the relative use of welcher, welche, welches, comparable with English which. As in most Germanic languages, including Old English, both of these inflect according to gender, case and number. They take their gender and number from the noun they modify, but the case from their function in their own clause.
The relative pronoun dem is neuter singular to agree with Haus, but dative because it follows a preposition in its own clause. On the same basis, it would be possible to substitute the pronoun welchem.
However, German uses the uninflecting was ('what') as a relative pronoun when the antecedent is alles, etwas or nichts ('everything', 'something', 'nothing'.).
In German, all relative clauses are marked with commas.
See Relative pronouns in the Spanish pronouns article.
In Latin, relative clauses follow the noun phrases they modify, and are always introduced using relative pronouns. Relative pronouns, like other pronouns in Latin, agree with their antecedents in gender and number, but not in case: a relative pronoun's case reflects its role in the relative clause it introduces, while its antecedent's case reflects the antecedent's role in the clause that contains the relative clause. (Nonetheless, it is possible for the pronoun and antecedent to be in the same case.) For example:
In the former example, urbēs and quae both function as subjects in their respective clauses, so both are in the nominative case; and due to gender and number agreement, both are feminine and plural. In the latter example, both are still feminine and plural, and urbēs is still in the nominative case, but quae has been replaced by quās, its accusative-case counterpart, to reflect its role as the direct object of vīdī.
For more information on the forms of Latin relative pronouns, see the section on relative pronouns in the article on Latin declension.
Ancient Greek follows the same rule as Latin.
The Ancient Greek relative pronoun ὅς, ἥ, ὅ (hós, hḗ, hó) is unrelated to the Latin word, since it derives from Proto-Indo-European *yos: in Proto-Greek, y before a vowel usually changed to h (debuccalization). Cognates include Sanskrit yas, yā, yad (where o changed to short a).[8]
The Greek definite article ὁ, ἡ, τό (ho, hē, tó) has a different origin, since it is related to Sanskrit sa, sā and Latin is-tud.[9]
Most Slavic languages use exactly the same principle as Latin does. The following sentences are the Latin examples translated to Croatian (the same sentences also apply to Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin):
In the first sentence, koji is in nominative, and in the second koje is in accusative. Both words are two case forms of the same relative pronoun, that is inflicted for gender (here: masculine), number (here: plural), and case.
The Celtic languages (at least the modern Insular Celtic languages) distinguish two types of relative clause: direct relative clauses and indirect relative clauses. A direct relative clause is used where the relativized element is the subject or the direct object of its clause (e.g. "the man who saw me", "the man whom I saw"), while an indirect relative clause is used where the relativized element is a genitival (e.g. "the man whose daughter is in the hospital") or is the object of a preposition (e.g. "the man to whom I gave the book"). Direct relative clauses are formed with a relative pronoun (unmarked for case) at the beginning; a gap (in terms of syntactic theory, a trace, indicated by t in the examples below) is left in the relative clause at the pronoun's expected position.
| an | fear | a | chonaic | t | mé |
| the | man | DIR-REL | saw | me | |
| "the man who saw me" | |||||
| y | dyn | a | welais |
| the | man | DIR-REL | I saw |
| "the man whom I saw" | |||
The direct relative particle "a" is not used with "mae" ("is") in Welsh; instead the form "sydd" or "sy'" is used:
| y | dyn | sy'n | blewog | iawn |
| the | man | DIR-REL + is | hairy | very |
| "the man who is very hairy" | ||||
There is also a defective verb "piau" (usually lenited to "biau"), corresponding to "who own(s)":
| y | dyn | piau | castell | anferth |
| the | man | DIR-REL + owns | castle | huge |
| "the man who owns a huge castle" | ||||
Indirect relative clauses are formed with a relativizer at the beginning; the relativized element remains in situ in the relative clause.
| an | fear | a | bhfuil | a | iníon | san | ospidéal |
| the | man | IND-REL | is | his | daughter | in the | hospital |
| "the man whose daughter is in the hospital" | |||||||
| y | dyn | y | rhois | y | llyfr | iddo |
| the | man | IND-REL | I gave | the | book | to him |
| "the man to whom I gave the book" | ||||||
Note that although both the Irish relative pronoun and the relativizer are 'a', the relative pronoun triggers lenition of a following consonant, while the relativizer triggers eclipsis (see Irish initial mutations).
Both direct and indirect relative particles can be used simply for emphasis, often in answer to a question or as a way of disagreeing with a statement. For instance, the Welsh example above, "y dyn a welais" means not only "the man whom I saw", but also "it was the man (and not anyone else) I saw"; and "y dyn y rhois y llyfr iddo" can likewise mean "it was the man (and not anyone else) to whom I gave the book".
In Biblical Hebrew, relative clauses were headed with the word asher, which could be either a relative pronoun or a relativizer. In later times, asher became interchangeable with the prefix she- (which is also used as a conjunction, with the sense of English that), and in Modern Hebrew, this use of she- is much more common than asher, except in some formal, archaic, or poetic writing. In meaning, the two are interchangeable; they are used regardless of whether the clause is modifying a human, regardless of their grammatical case in the relative clause, and regardless of whether the clause is restrictive.
Further, because Hebrew does not generally use its word for is, she- is used to distinguish adjective phrases used in epithet from adjective phrases used in attribution:
(This use of she- does not occur with simple adjectives, as Hebrew has a different way of making that distinction. For example, Ha-kise adom means "The chair [is] red," while Ha-kise ha-adom shavur means "The red chair is broken" - literally, "The chair the red [is] broken.")
Since 1994, the official rules of Modern Hebrew (as determined by the Academy of the Hebrew Language) have stated that relative clauses are to be punctuated in Hebrew the same way as in English (described above). That is, non-restrictive clauses are to be set off with commas, while restrictive clauses are not:
Nonetheless, many, perhaps most, speakers of Modern Hebrew still use the pre-1994 rules, which were based on the German rules (described above). Except for the simple adjective-phrase clauses described above, these speakers set off all relative clauses, restrictive or not, with commas:
One major difference between relative clauses in Hebrew and those in (for example) English is that in Hebrew, what might be called the "regular" pronoun is not always suppressed in the relative clause. To reuse the prior example:
More specifically, if this pronoun is the subject of the relative clause, it is always suppressed. If it is the direct object, then it is usually suppressed, though it is also correct to leave it in. (If it is suppressed, then the special preposition et, used to mark the direct object, is suppressed as well.) If it is the object of a preposition, it must be left in, because in Hebrew - unlike in English - a preposition cannot appear without its object. When the pronoun is left in, she- might more properly be called a relativizer than a relative pronoun.
The Hebrew relativizer she- ‘that’ "might be a shortened form of the Hebrew relativizer ‘asher ‘that’, which is related to Akkadian ‘ashru ‘place’ (cf. Semitic *‘athar) Alternatively, Hebrew ‘asher derived from she-, or it was a convergence of Proto-Semitic dhu (cf. Aramaic dī) and ‘asher [...] Whereas Israeli she- functions both as complementizer and relativizer, ashér can only function as a relativizer."[10]
In Literary Arabic there is a relative pronoun (in Arabic: الاسم الموصول al-ism al-mawṣūl) allaḏī (masculine singular), feminine singular allatī, masculine plural allaḏīna, feminine plural allawātī, masculine dual allaḏānī (nominative) / allaḏayni (accusative and genitive), feminine dual allatānī (nom.) / allataynī (acc. and gen.).
Its usage has two specific rules: it agrees with the antecedent in gender, number and case, and it is used only if the antecedent is definite. If the antecedent is indefinite, no relative pronoun is used. The former is called jumlat sila (conjunctive sentence) while the latter is called jumlat sifa (descriptive sentence).
In Demotic Arabic the multiple forms of the relative pronoun have been levelled in favour of a single form, a simple conjunction, which in most dialects is illi, and is never omitted. So in Palestinian Arabic the above sentences would be:
As in Hebrew, the regular pronoun referring to the antecedent is repeated in the relative clause - literally, "the boy whom I saw him in class..." (the -hu in ra'aituhu and the -ō in shuftō). The rules of suppression in Arabic are identical to those of Hebrew: obligatory suppression in the case that the pronoun is the subject of the relative clause, obligatory retention in the case that the pronoun is the object of a preposition, and at the discretion of the speaker if the pronoun is the direct object. The only difference from Hebrew is that, in the case of the direct object, it is preferable to retain the pronoun rather than suppress it.
Japanese does not employ relative pronouns to relate relative clauses to their antecedents. Instead, the relative clause directly modifies the noun phrase as an attributive verb, occupying the same syntactic space as an attributive adjective (before the noun phrase).
In fact, since so-called i-adjectives in Japanese are technically intransitive stative verbs, it can be argued that the structure of the first example (with an adjective) is the same as the others. A number of "adjectival" meanings, in Japanese, are customarily shown with relative clauses consisting solely of a verb or a verb complex:
Often confusing to speakers of languages which use relative pronouns are relative clauses which would in their own languages require a preposition with the pronoun to indicate the semantic relationship among the constituent parts of the phrase.
Here, the preposition "in" is missing from the Japanese ("missing" in the sense that the corresponding postposition would be used with the main clause verb in Japanese) Common sense indicates what the meaning is in this case, but the "missing preposition" can sometimes create ambiguity.
In this case, (1) is the context-free interpretation of choice, but (2) is possible with the proper context.
Without more context, both (1) and (2) are equally viable interpretations of the Japanese.
Note: Spaces are not ordinarily used in Japanese, but they are supplemented here to facilitate parsing by non-speakers of the language.
In Georgian, there are two strategies for forming relative clauses. The first is similar to that of English or Latin: the modified noun is followed by a relativizer that inflects for its embedded case and may take a postposition. The relativized noun may be preceded by a determiner.
| (ის) | კაცი, | რომელიც | პარკში | წავიდა, | გაზეთს | კითხულობს |
| (is) | ḳac-i, | romel-i-c | ṗarḳ=ši | c̣avida, | gazet-s | ḳitxulobs |
| (that.NOM) | man-NOM | which-NOM-REL | park=to | he.went | newspaper-DAT | he.reads.it |
| "the man who went to the park is reading the newspaper" | ||||||
| (ის) | ქალი, | რომელსაც | წერილს | დავუწერ, | თბილისში | ცხოვრობს |
| (is) | kal-i, | romel-sa-c | c̣eril-s | davuc̣er, | tbilis=ši | cxovrobs |
| (that.NOM) | woman-NOM | which-DAT-REL | letter-DAT | I.will.write.it.to.her | Tbilisi-in | she.lives |
| "the woman who I will write a letter to lives in Tbilisi" | ||||||
| ნინომ | (ის) | სკამი, | რომელზეც | ვზივარ, | იყიდა |
| Nino-m | (is) | sḳam-i, | romel=ze-c | vzivar, | iqida |
| Nino-ERG | (that.NOM) | chair-NOM | which=on-REL | I.sit | she.bought.it |
| "Nino bought the chair I am sitting in" | |||||
A second, more colloquial, strategy is marked by the invariant particle რომ rom. This particle is generally the second word of the clause, and since it does not decline, is often followed by the appropriately cased third-person pronoun to show the relativized noun's role in the embedded clause. A determiner precedes the relativized noun, which is also usually preceded by the clause as a whole.
| წერილს | რომ | მას | დავუწერ, | ის | ქალი | თბილისში | ცხოვრობს |
| c̣̣eril-s | rom | mas | davuc̣̣er, | is | kal-i | tbilis=ši | cxovrobs |
| letter-DAT | REL | 3S.DAT | I.will.write.it.to.her | that.NOM | woman-NOM | Tbilisi-in | she.lives |
| "the woman who I will write a letter to lives in Tbilisi" | |||||||
| მე | რომ | მასზე | ვზივარ, | ის | სკამი | ნინომ | იყიდა |
| me | rom | mas=ze | vzivar, | is | sḳam-i | Nino-m | iqida |
| 1S | REL | 3S.DAT=on | I.sit | that.NOM | chair-NOM | Nino-ERG | she.bought.it |
| "Nino bought the chair I am sitting in" | |||||||
Such relative clauses may be interally-headed. In such cases, the modified noun moves into the clause, taking the appropriate declension for the its role therein (thus eliminating the need for the third person pronouns in the above examples), and leaves behind the determiner (which now functions as a pronoun) in the matrix clause.
| ქალს | რომ | წერილს | დავუწერ, | ის | თბილისში | ცხოვრობს |
| kal-s | rom | c̣̣eril-s | davuc̣̣er, | is | tbilis=ši | cxovrobs |
| woman-DAT | REL | letter-DAT | I.will.write.it.to.her | 3S.NOM | Tbilisi-in | she.lives |
| "the woman who I will write a letter to lives in Tbilisi" | ||||||
Tagalog uses the gapping strategy to form relative clauses, with the complementiser, na / =ng 'that', separating the head, which is the noun being modified, from the actual relative clause. In (1a) below, lalaki 'man' serves as the head, while nagbigay ng bigas sa bata 'gave rice to the child' is the relative clause.
| (1) | a. | lalaki | =ng | nagbigay | ____ | ng | bigas | sa | bata |
| man | comp | act.gave | acc | rice | dat | child | |||
| "man that gave rice to the child" | |||||||||
| b. | Nagbigay | ang | lalaki | ng | bigas | sa | bata. | ||
| act.gave | nom | man | acc | rice | dat | child | |||
| "The man gave rice to the child." | |||||||||
The gap inside the relative clause corresponds to the position that the noun acting as the head would have normally taken, had it been in a declarative sentence. In (1a), the gap is in subject position within the relative clause. This corresponds to the subject position occupied by ang lalaki 'the man' in the declarative sentence in (1b).
There is a constraint in Tagalog on the position from which a noun can be relativised and in which a gap can appear: A noun has to be the subject within the relative clause in order for it to be relativised. The phrases in (2) are ungrammatical because the nouns that have been relativised are not the subjects of their respective relative clauses. In (2a), the gap is in direct object position, while in (2b), the gap is in indirect object position.
| (2) | a. | * | bigas | na | nagbigay | ang | lalaki | ____ | sa | bata |
| rice | comp | act.gave | nom | man | dat | child | ||||
| for: "rice that the man gave to the child" | ||||||||||
| b. | * | bata | =ng | nagbigay | ang | lalaki | ng | bigas | ____ | |
| rice | comp | act.gave | nom | man | acc | rice | ||||
| for: "child that the man gave rice to" | ||||||||||
The correct Tagalog translations for the intended meanings in (2) are found in (3), where the verbs have been passivised in order to raise the logical direct object in (3a) and the logical indirect object in (3b) to subject position. (Tagalog can have more than one passive voice form for any given verb.)
| (3) | a. | bigas | na | ibinigay | ng | lalaki | sa | bata |
| rice | comp | psv.gave | gen | man | dat | child | ||
| "rice that the man gave to the child" | ||||||||
| (or: "rice that was given to the child by the man") | ||||||||
| b. | bata | =ng | binigyan | ng | lalaki | ng | bigas | |
| child | comp | gave.psv | gen | man | acc | rice | ||
| "child that the man gave rice to" | ||||||||
| (or: "child that was given rice to by the man") | ||||||||
Tagalog relative clauses can be left-headed, as in (1a) and (3), right-headed, as in (4), or internally headed, as in (5).
| (4) | nagbigay | ng | bigas | sa | bata | na | lalaki |
| act.gave | acc | rice | dat | child | comp | man | |
| "man that gave rice to the child" | |||||||
| (5) | a. | nagbigay | na | lalaki | ng | bigas | sa | bata |
| act.gave | comp | man | acc | rice | dat | child | ||
| "man that gave rice to the child" | ||||||||
| b. | nagbigay | ng | bigas | na | lalaki | sa | bata | |
| act.gave | acc | rice | comp | man | dat | child | ||
| "man that gave rice to the child" | ||||||||
In (4), the head, lalaki 'man', is found after or to the right of the relative clause, nagbigay ng bigas sa bata 'gave rice to the child'. In (5), the head is found in some position inside the relative clause. Note that when the head appears to the right of or internally to the relative clause, the complementiser appears to the left of the head. When the head surfaces to the left of the relative clause, the complementiser surfaces to the right of the head.
There are exceptions to the subjects-only constraint to relativisation mentioned above. The first involves relativising the possessor of a noun phrase within the relative clause.
| (6) | bata | =ng | nasugatan | ang | daliri | ____ |
| child | comp | injured.psv | nom | finger | ||
| "child whose finger was injured" | ||||||
In (6), the head, bata 'child', is the owner of the injured finger. Note that ang daliri 'the finger' is the subject of the verb, nasugatan 'was injured'.
Another exception involves relativising the oblique noun phrase.
| (7) | a. | ospital | (na) | kung | saan | ipinanganak | si | Juan |
| hospital | comp | q-comp | where | psv.bore | nom | Juan | ||
| "house where Juan was born" | ||||||||
| b. | Nagtanong | siya | kung | saan | ipinanganak | si | Juan. | |
| act.asked | 3sg.nom | q-comp | where | psv.bore | nom | Juan | ||
| "She asked where Juan was born." | ||||||||
| c. | Ipinanganak | si | Juan | sa | ospital. | |||
| psv.bore | nom | Juan | loc | hospital | ||||
| "Juan was born at the hospital." | ||||||||
| d. | Saan | ipinanganak | si | Juan? | ||||
| where | psv.bore | nom | Juan | |||||
| "Where was Juan born?" | ||||||||
When an oblique noun phrase is relativised, as in (7a), na 'that', the complementiser that separates the head from the relative clause, is optional. The relative clause itself is also composed differently. In the examples in (1a), and in (3) to (6), the relative clauses are simple declaratives that contain a gap. However, the relative clause in (7a) looks more like an indirect question, complete with the interrogative complementiser, kung 'if', and a pre-verbally positioned WH-word like saan 'where', as in (7b). The sentence in (7c) is the declarative version of the relative clause in (7a), illustrating where the head, ospital 'hospital', would have been "before" relativisation. The question in (7d) shows the direct question version of the subordinate indirect question in (7b).
Relative clauses in Hawaiian[11] are avoided unless they are short.
If in English a relative clause would have a copula and an adjective, in Hawaiian the antecedent is simply modified by the adjective: "The honest man" instead of "the man who is honest". If the English relative clause would have a copula and a noun, in Hawaiian an appositive is used instead: "Paul, an apostle" instead of "Paul, who was an apostle".
If the English relative pronoun would be the subject of an intransitive or passive verb, in Hawaiian a participle is used instead of a full relative clause: "the people fallen" instead of "the people who fell"; "the thing given" instead of "the thing that was given". But when the relative clause's antecedent is a person, the English relative pronoun would be the subject of the relative clause, and the relative clause's verb is active and transitive, a relative clause is used and it begins with the relative pronoun nana: The one who me (past) sent = "the one who sent me".
If in English a relative pronoun would be the object of a relative clause, in Hawaiian the possessive form is used so as to treat the antecedent as something possessed: the things of me to have seen = "the things that I saw"; Here is theirs to have seen = This is what they saw".
| thuquñap | punchu | ||||
| dance-INF-3POSS | poncho | ||||
| "the poncho he is dancing with" | |||||
In Mandarin Chinese, the relative clause precedes the noun that it modifies, and ends with the relative particle de. If the relative clause is missing a subject but contains an object (if transitive), the main-clause noun is the implied subject of the relative clause:[12]
If the object but not the subject is missing from the relative clause, the main-clause noun is the implied object of the relative clause:
If both the subject and the object are missing from the relative clause, then the main-clause noun could either be the implied subject or the implied object of the relative clause; sometimes which is intended is clear from the context, especially when the subject or object of the verb must be human and the other must be non-human:
But sometimes ambiguity arises when it is not clear from the context whether the main-clause noun is intended as the subject or the object of the relative clause:
Sometimes a relative clause has both a subject and an object specified, in which case the main-clause noun is the implied object of an implied preposition in the relative clause:
In Hawaiian Creole English, an English-based creole also called Hawaiian Pidgin or simply Pidgin, relative clauses work in a way that is similar to, but not identical to, the way they work in English.[13] As in English, a relative pronoun that serves as the object of the verb in the relative clause can optionally be omitted: For example,
can also be expressed with the relative pronoun omitted, as
However, relative pronouns serving as the subject of a relative clause show more flexibility than in English; they can be included, as is mandatory in English, they can be omitted, or they can be replaced by another pronoun. For example, all of the following can occur and all mean the same thing:
In Gullah, an English-based creole spoken along the southeastern coast of the United States, no relative pronoun is normally used for the subject of a relative clause. For example: