Relative clause
Encyclopedia
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 pronoun
s called relative pronoun
s; 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 relativizer
s; 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.
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 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 clause
s.
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).
) 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
.
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. They also occur in deeply embedded positions in English, as in "That's the girl that I don't know what she did", 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.
, 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
.
in linguistics. Languages that place relative clauses after their head noun (so-called head-initial or VO languages) generally also have adjectives and genitive modifier
s 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 modifier
s 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 construction
s 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:
. In many languages, however, especially rigidly left-branching, dependent-marking language
s with prenominal relative clauses, 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:
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:
Some other examples:
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 voice
s 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.
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.).
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, is generally used, although , 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, is generally used, though as before, may be used instead for greater precision. (This is less common than the use of 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 ("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 :
More generally, in modern French, 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 is used), is generally used, though can be used if the antecedent is human. The preposition always appears before the pronoun, and the prepositions and (at/to) contract with to form and , or with to form and .
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.
, 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.
follows the same rule as Latin.
The Ancient Greek relative pronoun ὅς, ἥ, ὅ (hós, , hó) is unrelated to the Latin word, since it derives from Proto-Indo-European
: in Proto-Greek
, y before a vowel usually changed to h (debuccalization
). Cognate
s include Sanskrit
yas, yā, yad (where o changed to short a).
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.
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.
(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.
Irish
Welsh
The direct relative particle "a" is not used with "mae" ("is") in Welsh; instead the form "sydd" or "sy'" is used:
There is also a defective verb "piau" (usually lenited to "biau"), corresponding to "who own(s)":
Indirect relative clauses are formed with a relativizer
at the beginning; the relativized element remains in situ in the relative clause.
Irish
Welsh
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".
, 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
."
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.
, 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.
, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Tagalog relative clauses can be left-headed, as in (1a) and (3), right-headed, as in (4), or internally headed, as in (5).
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.
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.
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).
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".
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:
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. 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:
, 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:
Noun phrase
In grammar, a noun phrase, nominal phrase, or nominal group is a phrase based on a noun, pronoun, or other noun-like word optionally accompanied by modifiers such as adjectives....
, most commonly a noun
Noun
In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
. 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 pronoun
Pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun , such as, in English, the words it and he...
s called relative pronoun
Relative pronoun
A relative pronoun is a pronoun that marks a relative clause within a larger sentence. It is called a relative pronoun because it relates the relative clause to the noun that it modifies. In English, the relative pronouns are: who, whom, whose, whosever, whosesoever, which, and, in some...
s; 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 relativizer
Relativizer
In linguistics, a relativizer is a grammatical element used to indicate a relative clause. Not all languages use relativizers; most Indo-European languages use relative pronouns instead, and some languages, such as Japanese, rely solely on word order to indicate relative clauses...
s; 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.
Types of relative clause
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:
- How the role of the shared noun phrase is indicated in the embedded clause.
- How the two clauses are joined together.
- Where the embedded clause is placed relative to the head noun (in the process indicating which noun phrase in the main clause is modified).
For example, the English sentence "The man that I saw yesterday went home" can be described as follows:
- The role of the shared noun in the embedded clause is indicated by gapping (i.e. in the embedded clause "that I saw yesterday", a gap is left after "saw" to indicate where the shared noun would go).
- The clauses are joined by the complementizer "that".
- The embedded clause is placed after the head noun "the man".
The following sentences indicate various possibilities (only some of which are grammatical in English):
- "The man [that I saw yesterday] went home". (A complementizer linking the two clauses with a gapping strategy indicating the role of the shared noun in the embedded clause. One possibility in English. Very common cross-linguistically.)
- "The man [I saw yesterday] went home". (Gapping strategy, with no word joining the clauses—also known as a reduced relative clauseReduced relative clauseA reduced relative clause is a relative clause that is not marked by an overt complementizer . Reduced relative clauses often give rise to ambiguity or garden path effects, and have been a common topic of psycholinguistic study, especially in the field of sentence processing.-Description:Relative...
. One possibility in English. Used in ArabicArabic languageArabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
when the head noun is indefiniteDefinitenessIn grammatical theory, definiteness is a feature of noun phrases, distinguishing between entities which are specific and identifiable in a given context and entities which are not ....
, as in "a man" instead of "the man".) - "The man [whom I saw yesterday] went home". (A relative pronounRelative pronounA relative pronoun is a pronoun that marks a relative clause within a larger sentence. It is called a relative pronoun because it relates the relative clause to the noun that it modifies. In English, the relative pronouns are: who, whom, whose, whosever, whosesoever, which, and, in some...
indicating the role of the shared noun in the embedded clause — in this case, the direct object. Used in formal English, as in LatinLatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, GermanGerman languageGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
or RussianRussian languageRussian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
.) - "The man [seen by me yesterday] went home". (A reduced relative clauseReduced relative clauseA reduced relative clause is a relative clause that is not marked by an overt complementizer . Reduced relative clauses often give rise to ambiguity or garden path effects, and have been a common topic of psycholinguistic study, especially in the field of sentence processing.-Description:Relative...
, in this case passivizedPassive voicePassive voice is a grammatical voice common in many of the world's languages. Passive is used in a clause whose subject expresses the theme or patient of the main verb. That is, the subject undergoes an action or has its state changed. A sentence whose theme is marked as grammatical subject is...
. One possibility in English.) - "The man [that I saw him yesterday] went home". (A complementizer linking the two sentences with a resumptive pronounResumptive pronounA resumptive pronoun is a pronoun in a relative clause which refers to the antecedent of the main clause. The slight majority of world languages use resumptive pronouns instead of gaps in relative clauses...
indicating the role of the shared noun in the embedded clause, as in ArabicArabic languageArabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
, HebrewHebrew languageHebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
or PersianPersian languagePersian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
.) - "The man [that him I saw yesterday] went home". (Similar to the previous, but with the resumptive pronoun fronted. This occurs in modern GreekGreek languageGreek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
and as one possibility in modern HebrewHebrew languageHebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
; the combination that him of complementizer and resumptive pronoun behaves similar to a unitary relative pronoun.) - "The [I saw yesterday]'s man went home". (Preceding relative clause with gapping and use of a possessive particle — as normally used in a genitive constructionGenitive constructionIn grammar, a genitive construction or genitival construction is a type of grammatical construction used to express a relation between two nouns such as the possession of one by another , or some other type of connection...
— to link the relative clause to the head noun. This occurs in ChineseChinese languageThe Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
and certain other languages influenced by it.) - "The [I saw yesterday] man went home". (Preceding relative clause with gapping and no linking word, as in JapaneseJapanese languageis a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
.) - "The man [of my seeing yesterday] went home". (NominalizedNominalizationIn linguistics, nominalization or nominalisation is the use of a verb, an adjective, or an adverb as the head of a noun phrase, with or without morphological transformation...
relative clause, as in TurkishTurkish languageTurkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...
.) - "[Which man I saw yesterday], that man went home". (A correlative structure, as in HindiHindiStandard Hindi, or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi, also known as Manak Hindi , High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, and Literary Hindi, is a standardized and sanskritized register of the Hindustani language derived from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi...
.) - "[I saw the man yesterday] went home." (An unreduced, internally-headed relative clause, as in TibetanTibetan languageThe Tibetan languages are a cluster of mutually-unintelligible Tibeto-Burman languages spoken primarily by Tibetan peoples who live across a wide area of eastern Central Asia bordering the Indian subcontinent, including the Tibetan Plateau and the northern Indian subcontinent in Baltistan, Ladakh,...
or NavajoNavajo languageNavajo or Navaho is an Athabaskan language spoken in the southwestern United States. It is geographically and linguistically one of the Southern Athabaskan languages .Navajo has more speakers than any other Native American language north of the...
.)
Strategies for indicating the role of the shared noun in the relative clause
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:- Gap strategy or gapped relative clause
- Relative pronoun
- Pronoun retention
- Nonreduction
Gapped relative clause
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 clause
Reduced relative clause
A reduced relative clause is a relative clause that is not marked by an overt complementizer . Reduced relative clauses often give rise to ambiguity or garden path effects, and have been a common topic of psycholinguistic study, especially in the field of sentence processing.-Description:Relative...
s.
In non-verb-final languages, apart from languages like Thai
Thai language
Thai , also known as Central Thai and Siamese, is the national and official language of Thailand and the native language of the Thai people, Thailand's dominant ethnic group. Thai is a member of the Tai group of the Tai–Kadai language family. Historical linguists have been unable to definitively...
and Vietnamese
Vietnamese language
Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...
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
Classical Arabic
Classical Arabic , also known as Qur'anic or Koranic Arabic, is the form of the Arabic language used in literary texts from Umayyad and Abbasid times . It is based on the Medieval dialects of Arab tribes...
, 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
Austronesian languages
The Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia that are spoken by about 386 million people. It is on par with Indo-European, Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic and Uralic as one of the...
, 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
Passive voice
Passive voice is a grammatical voice common in many of the world's languages. Passive is used in a clause whose subject expresses the theme or patient of the main verb. That is, the subject undergoes an action or has its state changed. A sentence whose theme is marked as grammatical subject is...
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).
Relative pronoun type
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 pronounRelative pronoun
A relative pronoun is a pronoun that marks a relative clause within a larger sentence. It is called a relative pronoun because it relates the relative clause to the noun that it modifies. In English, the relative pronouns are: who, whom, whose, whosever, whosesoever, which, and, in some...
) 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
Classical Arabic
Classical Arabic , also known as Qur'anic or Koranic Arabic, is the form of the Arabic language used in literary texts from Umayyad and Abbasid times . It is based on the Medieval dialects of Arab tribes...
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
Celtic languages
The Celtic languages are descended from Proto-Celtic, or "Common Celtic"; a branch of the greater Indo-European language family...
and Indo-Aryan family
Indo-Aryan languages
The Indo-Aryan languages constitutes a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, itself a branch of the Indo-European language family...
. The influence of Spanish has led to their adaption by a very small number of Native American languages
Indigenous languages of the Americas
Indigenous languages of the Americas are spoken by indigenous peoples from Alaska and Greenland to the southern tip of South America, encompassing the land masses which constitute the Americas. These indigenous languages consist of dozens of distinct language families as well as many language...
, of which the best-known are the Keresan languages
Keresan languages
Keresan , also Keres , is a group of seven related languages spoken by Keres Pueblo peoples in New Mexico, U.S.A.. Each is mutually intelligible with its closest neighbors...
.
Pronoun retention type
In this type, the position relativised is indicated by means of a personal pronounPersonal pronoun
Personal pronouns are pronouns used as substitutes for proper or common nouns. All known languages contain personal pronouns.- English personal pronouns :English in common use today has seven personal pronouns:*first-person singular...
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
Resumptive pronoun
A resumptive pronoun is a pronoun in a relative clause which refers to the antecedent of the main clause. The slight majority of world languages use resumptive pronouns instead of gaps in relative clauses...
. 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
Persian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
and Classical Arabic
Classical Arabic
Classical Arabic , also known as Qur'anic or Koranic Arabic, is the form of the Arabic language used in literary texts from Umayyad and Abbasid times . It is based on the Medieval dialects of Arab tribes...
, 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
Languages of Africa
There are over 2100 and by some counts over 3000 languages spoken natively in Africa in several major language families:*Afro-Asiatic spread throughout the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahel...
and Asia, and also used by the Celtic languages of northwest Europe. They also occur in deeply embedded positions in English, as in "That's the girl that I don't know what she did", although this is sometimes considered non-standard.
Only a very small number of languages, of which the best known is Yoruba
Yoruba language
Yorùbá is a Niger–Congo language spoken in West Africa by approximately 20 million speakers. The native tongue of the Yoruba people, it is spoken, among other languages, in Nigeria, Benin, and Togo and in communities in other parts of Africa, Europe and the Americas...
, have pronoun retention as their sole grammatical type of relative clause.
Nonreduction type
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 NavajoNavajo language
Navajo or Navaho is an Athabaskan language spoken in the southwestern United States. It is geographically and linguistically one of the Southern Athabaskan languages .Navajo has more speakers than any other Native American language north of the...
, which uses a special relative verb (as with some other Native American languages).
A second strategy is the correlative-clause strategy used by Hindi
Hindi
Standard Hindi, or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi, also known as Manak Hindi , High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, and Literary Hindi, is a standardized and sanskritized register of the Hindustani language derived from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi...
and other Indo-Aryan languages
Indo-Aryan languages
The Indo-Aryan languages constitutes a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, itself a branch of the Indo-European language family...
, as well as Bambara
Bambara language
Bambara, more correctly known as Bamanankan , its designation in the language itself , is a language spoken in Mali by as many as six million people...
. 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:
- The man whose daughter I know is arriving tomorrow.
Informal English would tend to say instead
- This man, I know his daughter, (and) he's arriving tomorrow.
In general, however, nonreduction is restricted to verb-final languages, though it is more common among those that are head-marking
Head-marking language
A head-marking language is one where the grammatical marks showing relations between different constituents of a phrase tend to be placed on the heads of the phrase in question, rather than the modifiers or dependents. In a noun phrase, the head is the main noun and the dependents are the...
.
Strategies for joining the relative clause to the main clause
The following are some of the common strategies for joining the two clauses:- Use of an indeclinable particle (specifically, a complementizerComplementizerIn linguistics , a complementizer is a syntactic category roughly equivalent to the term subordinating conjunction in traditional grammar. For example, the word that is generally called a complementizer in English sentences like Mary believes that it is raining...
) inserted into the sentence, placed next to the modified noun; the embedded clause is likewise inserted into the appropriate position, typically placed on the other side of the complementizer. This strategy is very common and arguably occurs in English with the word that ("the main that I saw"), though this interpretation of "that" as something other than a relative pronoun is controversial (see below). In the modern varieties of ArabicVarieties of ArabicThe Arabic language is a Semitic language characterized by a wide number of linguistic varieties within its five regional forms. The largest divisions occur between the spoken languages of different regions. The Arabic of North Africa, for example, is often incomprehensible to an Arabic speaker...
(using illi placed after the modified noun); in ChineseChinese languageThe Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
(using de placed before the modified noun); and in JapaneseJapanese languageis a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
(using no placed before the modified noun). - Use of a relative pronounRelative pronounA relative pronoun is a pronoun that marks a relative clause within a larger sentence. It is called a relative pronoun because it relates the relative clause to the noun that it modifies. In English, the relative pronouns are: who, whom, whose, whosever, whosesoever, which, and, in some...
. Prototypically, a relative pronoun agrees with the head noun in gender, number, definiteness, animacy, etc., but adopts the caseGrammatical caseIn grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun is an inflectional form that indicates its grammatical function in a phrase, clause, or sentence. For example, a pronoun may play the role of subject , of direct object , or of possessor...
that the shared noun assumes in the embedded, not matrix, clause. This is the case in a number of conservative European languages, such as LatinLatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, GermanGerman languageGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
and RussianRussian languageRussian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
. Many languages also have similar linking words common termed "relative pronouns" that agree in some way with the head noun, but do not adopt the case role of the embedded clause. In English, for example, the use of who vs. which agrees with the animacy of the head noun, but there is no case agreement except in the formal English contrast who vs. whom (which is often used incorrectly, if at all, in speech). Similarly, in Classical ArabicClassical ArabicClassical Arabic , also known as Qur'anic or Koranic Arabic, is the form of the Arabic language used in literary texts from Umayyad and Abbasid times . It is based on the Medieval dialects of Arab tribes...
, there is a relative pronoun that agrees in number, gender, definitenessDefinitenessIn grammatical theory, definiteness is a feature of noun phrases, distinguishing between entities which are specific and identifiable in a given context and entities which are not ....
and case with the head noun (rather than taking the case role of the noun in the embedded clause). Languages with prototypical relative pronouns typically use the gapping strategy for indicating the role in the embedded clause, since the relative pronoun itself indicates the role by its case. (Classical ArabicClassical ArabicClassical Arabic , also known as Qur'anic or Koranic Arabic, is the form of the Arabic language used in literary texts from Umayyad and Abbasid times . It is based on the Medieval dialects of Arab tribes...
, where the case marking indicates something else, uses a resumptive pronounResumptive pronounA resumptive pronoun is a pronoun in a relative clause which refers to the antecedent of the main clause. The slight majority of world languages use resumptive pronouns instead of gaps in relative clauses...
.) Some linguists prefer to use the term relative pronoun only for the prototypical cases (but in this case it's unclear what to call the non-prototypical cases). - Directly inserting the embedded clause in the matrix clause at the appropriate position, with no word used to join them. This is common, for example, in English (cf. "The man I saw yesterday went home"), and is used in Classical ArabicClassical ArabicClassical Arabic , also known as Qur'anic or Koranic Arabic, is the form of the Arabic language used in literary texts from Umayyad and Abbasid times . It is based on the Medieval dialects of Arab tribes...
in relative clauses that modify indefinite nouns. - By nominalizingNominalizationIn linguistics, nominalization or nominalisation is the use of a verb, an adjective, or an adverb as the head of a noun phrase, with or without morphological transformation...
the relative clause (e.g. converting it to a participial construction). Generally, no relative pronoun or complementizer is used. This occurs, for example, in reduced relative clauseReduced relative clauseA reduced relative clause is a relative clause that is not marked by an overt complementizer . Reduced relative clauses often give rise to ambiguity or garden path effects, and have been a common topic of psycholinguistic study, especially in the field of sentence processing.-Description:Relative...
s in English (e.g. "The man seen by me yesterday went home" or "The man planning to go home soon is my friend"). Formal German makes common use of such participial relative clauses, which can become extremely long. This is also the normal strategy in TurkishTurkish languageTurkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...
, which has sentences equivalent to "I ate the potato of Hasan's giving to Sina" (in place of "I ate the potato that Hasan gave to Sina"). Note that this can be viewed as a situation in which the "complementizer" is attached to the verb of the embedded clause (e.g. in English, "-ing" or "-ed" can be viewed as a type of complementizer).
Position of the head noun with respect to the relative clause
The positioning of a relative clause before or after a head noun is related to the more general concept of branchingBranching (linguistics)
In linguistics, branching is the general tendency towards a given order of words within sentences and smaller grammatical units within sentences...
in linguistics. Languages that place relative clauses after their head noun (so-called head-initial or VO languages) generally also have adjectives and genitive modifier
Genitive construction
In grammar, a genitive construction or genitival construction is a type of grammatical construction used to express a relation between two nouns such as the possession of one by another , or some other type of connection...
s following the head noun, as well as verbs preceding their objects. French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
and Arabic
Arabic language
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
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 modifier
Genitive construction
In grammar, a genitive construction or genitival construction is a type of grammatical construction used to express a relation between two nouns such as the possession of one by another , or some other type of connection...
s preceding the head noun, as well as verbs following their objects. Turkish
Turkish language
Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...
and Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
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 construction
Genitive construction
In grammar, a genitive construction or genitival construction is a type of grammatical construction used to express a relation between two nouns such as the possession of one by another , or some other type of connection...
s with both preceding and following modifiers ("the friend of my father" vs. "my father's friend"). Chinese
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
has the VO order, with verb preceding object, but otherwise is generally head-final.
Various possibilities for ordering are:
- Relative clause following the head noun, as in English, FrenchFrench languageFrench is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
or ArabicArabic languageArabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
. - Relative clause preceding the head noun, as in TurkishTurkish languageTurkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...
, JapaneseJapanese languageis a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
, or ChineseChinese languageThe Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
. - Head noun within the relative clause (an internally-headed relative clause). An example of such a language is NavajoNavajo languageNavajo or Navaho is an Athabaskan language spoken in the southwestern United States. It is geographically and linguistically one of the Southern Athabaskan languages .Navajo has more speakers than any other Native American language north of the...
. These languages are said to have nonreduced relative clauses. These languages have a structure equivalent to "[I saw the man yesterday] went home". - Adjoined relative clause. These languages have the relative clause completely outside the main clause, and use a correlative structure to link the two. These languages also have nonreduced relative clauses. HindiHindiStandard Hindi, or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi, also known as Manak Hindi , High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, and Literary Hindi, is a standardized and sanskritized register of the Hindustani language derived from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi...
is the most well known such language, and have a structure similar to "Which man I saw yesterday, that man went home" or (with non-fronting of the relativized noun in the relative clause) "I saw which man yesterday, that man went home". Another example is WarlpiriWarlpiri languageThe Warlpiri language is spoken by about 3000 of the Warlpiri people in Australia's Northern Territory. It is one of the Ngarrkic languages of the large Southwest branch of the Pama–Nyungan family, and is one of the largest aboriginal languages in Australia in terms of number of speakers.-...
, which constructs relative clauses of a form similar to "I saw the man yesterday, which he was going home". However, it is sometimes said these languages have no relative clauses at all, since the sentences of this form can equally well translate as "I saw the man who was going home yesterday" or "I saw the man yesterday when/while he was going home".
Accessibility hierarchy
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 argumentVerb argument
In linguistics, a verb argument is a phrase that appears in a syntactic relationship with the verb in a clause. In English, for example, the two most important arguments are the subject and the direct object....
. In many languages, however, especially rigidly left-branching, dependent-marking language
Dependent-marking language
A dependent-marking language is one where the grammatical marks showing relations between different constituents of a phrase tend to be placed on the dependents or modifiers, rather than the heads of the phrase in question. In a noun phrase, the head is the main noun and the dependents are the...
s with prenominal relative clauses, there are major restrictions on the role the antecedent may have in the relative clause.
Edward L. Keenan
Edward L. Keenan
Edward L. Keenan is Andrew W. Mellon professor emeritus of history at Harvard University. He works primarily on medieval Russia, especially the cultural and political history of Muscovy c. 1400 - c...
and Bernard Comrie
Bernard Comrie
Bernard Comrie is a British-born linguist. Comrie is a specialist in linguistic typology and linguistic universals, and on Caucasian languages....
noted that these roles can be ranked cross-linguistically in the following order from most accessible to least accessible:
- Subject > Direct Object > Indirect Object > Oblique > Genitive > Object of comparative
Ergative-absolutive languages have a similar hierarchy:
- AbsolutiveAbsolutive caseThe absolutive case is the unmarked grammatical case of a core argument of a verb which is used as the citation form of a noun.-In ergative languages:...
> ErgativeErgative caseThe ergative case is the grammatical case that identifies the subject of a transitive verb in ergative-absolutive languages.-Characteristics:...
> Indirect Object > etc. (same as above)
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
Malagasy language
Malagasy is the national language of Madagascar, a member of the Austronesian family of languages. Most people in Madagascar speak it as a first language as do some people of Malagasy descent elsewhere.-History:...
can relativize only subject and Chukchi
Chukchi language
The Chukchi language is a Palaeosiberian language spoken by Chukchi people in the easternmost extremity of Siberia, mainly in Chukotka Autonomous Okrug...
only absolutive arguments, whilst Basque
Basque language
Basque is the ancestral language of the Basque people, who inhabit the Basque Country, a region spanning an area in northeastern Spain and southwestern France. It is spoken by 25.7% of Basques in all territories...
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
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
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 Subject (grammar) The subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammars; the other constituent is the predicate. According to another tradition, i.e... |
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 Oblique case An oblique case in linguistics is a noun case of synthetic languages that is used generally when a noun is the object of a verb or a preposition... |
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 Subject (grammar) The subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammars; the other constituent is the predicate. According to another tradition, i.e... |
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 Oblique case An oblique case in linguistics is a noun case of synthetic languages that is used generally when a noun is the object of a verb or a preposition... |
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 voice
Applicative voice
The applicative voice is a grammatical voice which promotes an oblique argument of a verb to the object argument, and indicates the oblique role within the meaning of the verb. When the applicative voice is applied to a verb, its valency may be increased by one...
s to relativize obliques, but in such languages as Chukchi antipassives
Antipassive voice
The antipassive voice is a verb voice that works on transitive verbs by deleting the object. This construction is similar to the passive voice, in that it decreases the verb's valency by one - the passive by deleting the subject , the antipassive by deleting the object The antipassive voice...
are used to raise ergative arguments to absolutive.
For example, a language that can relativize only subjects could say this:
- The girl [who likes me] came to visit.
But not:
- *The girl [who I like] came to visit.
- *The girl [who I gave a rose to] came to visit.
- *The girl [who I watched a movie with] came to visit.
- *The girl [whose father I know] came to visit.
- *The girl [who I know the father of] came to visit. (equivalent to previous)
- *The girl [who I am taller than] came to visit.
These languages might form an equivalent sentence by passivization
Passive voice
Passive voice is a grammatical voice common in many of the world's languages. Passive is used in a clause whose subject expresses the theme or patient of the main verb. That is, the subject undergoes an action or has its state changed. A sentence whose theme is marked as grammatical subject is...
:
- The girl [who was liked by me] came to visit.
- The girl [who was given a rose by me] came to visit.
- The girl [who was watched a movie with by me] came to visit.
- The girl [who was known the father of by me] came to visit.
- The girl [who was been taller than by me] came to visit.
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:
- The girl [who I like] came to visit.
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
Applicative voice
The applicative voice is a grammatical voice which promotes an oblique argument of a verb to the object argument, and indicates the oblique role within the meaning of the verb. When the applicative voice is applied to a verb, its valency may be increased by one...
, similar to how the passive voice
Passive voice
Passive voice is a grammatical voice common in many of the world's languages. Passive is used in a clause whose subject expresses the theme or patient of the main verb. That is, the subject undergoes an action or has its state changed. A sentence whose theme is marked as grammatical subject is...
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):
- The girl [who I gave a rose] came to visit.
- The girl [who I with-watched a movie] came to visit.
- The girl [who I (of-)know the father] came to visit.
- The girl [who I out-tall] came to visit.
Modern grammars may use the accessibility hierarchy to order productions — e.g. in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
Head-driven phrase structure grammar
Head-driven phrase structure grammar is a highly lexicalized, non-derivational generative grammar theory developed by Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag. It is the immediate successor to generalized phrase structure grammar. HPSG draws from other fields such as computer science and uses Ferdinand de...
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
Lexical functional grammar
Lexical functional grammar is a grammar framework in theoretical linguistics, a variety of generative grammar. It is a type of phrase structure grammar, as opposed to a dependency grammar. The development of the theory was initiated by Joan Bresnan and Ronald Kaplan in the 1970s, in reaction to...
where it is known as Syntactic
Rank or the Relational Hierarchy.
English
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.
- For a human antecedent, "who" or "whom" is usually used ("He is the person who saw me", "He is the person who(m) I saw"), although occasionally "that" is used instead. For a non-human antecedent, "that" or "which" is used.
- In a non-restrictive clause with a non-human antecedent, "which" is used ("The tree, which has fallen, is over there"), while in a restrictive clause with a non-human antecedent "that" or "which" is used ("The tree that fell is over there", "The tree which fell is over there") (although some prescriptive grammars require the use of "that" in this context).
- The relative pronoun "who(m)" has a subjective case form "who" that must be used if it is the subject of the relative clause ("He is the person who saw me"), and an objective case form which in formal usage is used as the object of a verb or preposition in the relative clause ("He is the person whom I saw", "He is the person whom I talked to", "He is the person to whom I talked"); but in informal usage "whom" is often replaced by "who".
In English, as in some other languages (such as French; see below), non-restrictive
Restrictiveness
In semantics, a modifier is said to be restrictive if it restricts the reference of its head. For example, in "the red car is fancier than the blue one", red and blue are restrictive, because they restrict which cars car and one are referring to...
relative clauses are set off with commas, but restrictive ones are not:
- "I met a man and a woman yesterday. The woman, who had a thick French accent, was very pretty." (non-restrictive — does not narrow down who is being talked about)
- "I met two women yesterday, one with a thick French accent and one with a mild Italian one. The woman who had the thick French accent was very pretty." (restrictive — adds information about who is being referred to)
As regards relative clauses, English has two particularities that are unique among the Germanic languages:
- In other Germanic languages, if a relative pronoun is the object of a preposition in the relative clause, then the preposition always appears at the start of the clause, before the relative pronoun. In English, the preposition will often appear where it would appear if the clause were an independent clause — in other words, the relative pronoun "strands" it when it moves to the start of the clause. For example, in "That is the doctrine I believe in", "in" appears in the same place (clause-final) as it does is the independent clause "I believe in it." This construction is equivalent in meaning to "That is the doctrine in which I believe", and both are correct in English. It used to be common to regard the position-final preposition usage as a grammatical error (see: linguistic prescriptionLinguistic prescriptionIn linguistics, prescription denotes normative practices on such aspects of language use as spelling, grammar, pronunciation, and syntax. It includes judgments on what usages are socially proper and politically correct...
) but in fact it has been a standard feature of the language since the times of Middle EnglishMiddle EnglishMiddle English is the stage in the history of the English language during the High and Late Middle Ages, or roughly during the four centuries between the late 11th and the late 15th century....
. - In other Germanic languages, a relative pronoun is always necessary. In English, however, it may be suppressed in a restrictive clause (as in "The man [whom] we met was very friendly"), provided it would not serve as the subject of the main verb (the relative pronoun is mandatory in "He is the person who saw me"). When the relative pronoun is omitted, if in the unsuppressed counterpart the relative pronoun is the object of a preposition in the relative clause, then said preposition is always "stranded" in the manner described above ("That is the doctrine I believe in"); it is never moved to the start of the clause (so "That is the doctrine in I believe" never occurs).
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
British National Corpus
The British National Corpus is a 100-million-word text corpus of samples of written and spoken English from a wide range of sources. It was compiled as a general corpus in the field of corpus linguistics...
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.).
French
The system of relative pronouns in FrenchFrench language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
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, is generally used, although , 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, is generally used, though as before, may be used instead for greater precision. (This is less common than the use of 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 ("whose") is used, but does not act as a determiner for the noun "possessed":
- ("I spoke with a woman whose son I work with." - lit., "I spoke with a woman of whom I work with the son.")
This construction is also used in non-possessive cases where the pronoun replaces an object marked by :
- ("That's the man of whom I spoke.")
More generally, in modern French, can signal the topic of the following clause, without replacing anything in this clause:
- ("That's a man about whom I believe that he must make a lot of money.")
When the pronoun is to act as the object of a preposition (other than when is used), is generally used, though can be used if the antecedent is human. The preposition always appears before the pronoun, and the prepositions and (at/to) contract with to form and , or with to form and .
German
Aside from their highly inflected forms, GermanGerman language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
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.
- Das Haus, in dem ich wohne, ist sehr alt.
- The house in which I live is very old.
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'.).
- Alles, was Jack macht, gelingt ihm.
- Everything that Jack does is a success.
In German, all relative clauses are marked with commas.
Spanish
See Relative pronouns in the Spanish pronouns article.Latin
In LatinLatin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, 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
Grammatical gender
Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...
and number
Grammatical number
In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
, but not in case
Grammatical case
In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun is an inflectional form that indicates its grammatical function in a phrase, clause, or sentence. For example, a pronoun may play the role of subject , of direct object , or of possessor...
: 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:
- Urbēs, quae sunt magnae, videntur. (The cities, which are large, are being seen.)
- Urbēs, quās vīdī, erant magnae. (The cities, which I saw, were large.)
In the former example, urbēs and quae both function as subjects
Subject (grammar)
The subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammars; the other constituent is the predicate. According to another tradition, i.e...
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
Ancient GreekAncient Greek
Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
follows the same rule as Latin.
- αἱ πόλεις, ἃς εἶδον, μεγάλαι εἰσίν.
- hai póleis, hàs eîdon, megálai eisin.
- The cities that I saw were large.
The Ancient Greek relative pronoun ὅς, ἥ, ὅ (hós, , hó) is unrelated to the Latin word, since it derives from Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European language
The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...
: in Proto-Greek
Proto-Greek language
The Proto-Greek language is the assumed last common ancestor of all known varieties of Greek, including Mycenaean, the classical Greek dialects , and ultimately Koine, Byzantine and modern Greek...
, y before a vowel usually changed to h (debuccalization
Debuccalization
Debuccalization is a sound change in which a consonant loses its original place of articulation and becomes or . The pronunciation of a consonant as is sometimes called aspiration, but in phonetics aspiration is the burst of air accompanying a plosive...
). Cognate
Cognate
In linguistics, cognates are words that have a common etymological origin. This learned term derives from the Latin cognatus . Cognates within the same language are called doublets. Strictly speaking, loanwords from another language are usually not meant by the term, e.g...
s include Sanskrit
Sanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
yas, yā, yad (where o changed to short a).
The Greek definite article ὁ, ἡ, τό (ho, hē, tó) has a different origin, since it is related to Sanskrit sa, sā and Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
is-tud.
Slavic languages
Most Slavic languagesSlavic languages
The Slavic languages , a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia.-Branches:Scholars traditionally divide Slavic...
use exactly the same principle as Latin does. The following sentences are the Latin examples translated to Croatian
Croatian language
Croatian is the collective name for the standard language and dialects spoken by Croats, principally in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Serbian province of Vojvodina and other neighbouring countries...
(the same sentences also apply to Serbian
Serbian language
Serbian is a form of Serbo-Croatian, a South Slavic language, spoken by Serbs in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and neighbouring countries....
, Bosnian
Bosnian language
Bosnian is a South Slavic language, spoken by Bosniaks. As a standardized form of the Shtokavian dialect, it is one of the three official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina....
and Montenegrin
Montenegrin language
Montenegrin is a name used for the Serbo-Croatian language as spoken by Montenegrins; it also refers to an incipient standardized form of the Shtokavian dialect of Serbo-Croatian used as the official language of Montenegro...
):
- Gradovi, koji su veliki, se vide. (The cities, which are large, are being seen.)
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.
Celtic languages
The Celtic languagesCeltic languages
The Celtic languages are descended from Proto-Celtic, or "Common Celtic"; a branch of the greater Indo-European language family...
(at least the modern Insular Celtic languages
Insular Celtic languages
Insular Celtic languages are those Celtic languages that originated in the British Isles, in contrast to the Continental Celtic languages of mainland Europe and Anatolia. All surviving Celtic languages are from the Insular Celtic group; the Continental Celtic languages are extinct...
) 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
Relative pronoun
A relative pronoun is a pronoun that marks a relative clause within a larger sentence. It is called a relative pronoun because it relates the relative clause to the noun that it modifies. In English, the relative pronouns are: who, whom, whose, whosever, whosesoever, which, and, in some...
(unmarked for case) at the beginning; a gap (in terms of syntactic theory, a trace
Trace (linguistics)
In transformational grammar, a trace is an empty category that occupies a position in the syntactic structure. In some theories of syntax, traces are used in the account of constructions such as wh-movement and passive....
, indicated by t in the examples below) is left in the relative clause at the pronoun's expected position.
Irish
| an | fear | a | chonaic | t | mé |
| the | man | DIR-REL | saw | me | |
| "the man who saw me" | |||||
Welsh
| 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
Relativizer
In linguistics, a relativizer is a grammatical element used to indicate a relative clause. Not all languages use relativizers; most Indo-European languages use relative pronouns instead, and some languages, such as Japanese, rely solely on word order to indicate relative clauses...
at the beginning; the relativized element remains in situ in the relative clause.
Irish
| 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" | |||||||
Welsh
| 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
Irish initial mutations
Irish, like all modern Celtic languages, is characterized by its initial consonant mutations. These mutations affect the initial consonant of a word under specific morphological and syntactic conditions...
).
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".
Hebrew
In Biblical HebrewBiblical Hebrew language
Biblical Hebrew , also called Classical Hebrew , is the archaic form of the Hebrew language, a Canaanite Semitic language spoken in the area known as Canaan between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Biblical Hebrew is attested from about the 10th century BCE, and persisted through...
, relative clauses were headed with the word asher, which could be either a relative pronoun
Relative pronoun
A relative pronoun is a pronoun that marks a relative clause within a larger sentence. It is called a relative pronoun because it relates the relative clause to the noun that it modifies. In English, the relative pronouns are: who, whom, whose, whosever, whosesoever, which, and, in some...
or a relativizer
Relativizer
In linguistics, a relativizer is a grammatical element used to indicate a relative clause. Not all languages use relativizers; most Indo-European languages use relative pronouns instead, and some languages, such as Japanese, rely solely on word order to indicate relative clauses...
. 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:
- Ha-kise l'-yad-kha. ("The chair is next to you." - lit., "The-chair [is] to-hand-your.")
- Ha-kise she-l'-yad-kha shavur. ("The chair next to you is broken." - lit., "The-chair that-[is]-to-hand-your [is] broken.")
(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
Academy of the Hebrew Language
The Academy of the Hebrew Language was established by the Israeli government in 1953 as the "supreme institution for scholarship on the Hebrew language."-History:...
) 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:
- Ha-kise, she-ata yoshev alav, shavur. ("The chair, which you are sitting on, is broken.")
- Ha-kise she-ata yoshev alav shavur. ("The chair that you are sitting on is broken.")
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:
- Ha-kise, she-ata yoshev alav, shavur. ("The chair that you are sitting on is broken," or "The chair, which you are sitting on, is broken.")
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:
- Ha-kise, she-ata yoshev alav, shavur. (lit., "The chair, which you are sitting on it, [is] broken.")
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
Relativizer
In linguistics, a relativizer is a grammatical element used to indicate a relative clause. Not all languages use relativizers; most Indo-European languages use relative pronouns instead, and some languages, such as Japanese, rely solely on word order to indicate relative clauses...
than a relative pronoun.
The Hebrew
Hebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
relativizer
Relativizer
In linguistics, a relativizer is a grammatical element used to indicate a relative clause. Not all languages use relativizers; most Indo-European languages use relative pronouns instead, and some languages, such as Japanese, rely solely on word order to indicate relative clauses...
she- ‘that’ "might be a shortened form of the Hebrew
Hebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
relativizer
Relativizer
In linguistics, a relativizer is a grammatical element used to indicate a relative clause. Not all languages use relativizers; most Indo-European languages use relative pronouns instead, and some languages, such as Japanese, rely solely on word order to indicate relative clauses...
‘asher ‘that’, which is related to Akkadian
Akkadian language
Akkadian is an extinct Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia. The earliest attested Semitic language, it used the cuneiform writing system derived ultimately from ancient Sumerian, an unrelated language isolate...
‘ashru ‘place’ (cf. Semitic *‘athar) Alternatively, Hebrew
Hebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
‘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
Complementizer
In linguistics , a complementizer is a syntactic category roughly equivalent to the term subordinating conjunction in traditional grammar. For example, the word that is generally called a complementizer in English sentences like Mary believes that it is raining...
and relativizer
Relativizer
In linguistics, a relativizer is a grammatical element used to indicate a relative clause. Not all languages use relativizers; most Indo-European languages use relative pronouns instead, and some languages, such as Japanese, rely solely on word order to indicate relative clauses...
, ashér can only function as a relativizer
Relativizer
In linguistics, a relativizer is a grammatical element used to indicate a relative clause. Not all languages use relativizers; most Indo-European languages use relative pronouns instead, and some languages, such as Japanese, rely solely on word order to indicate relative clauses...
."
Arabic
In Literary Arabic there is a relative pronoun (in Arabic: ) 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).
- al-waladu (a)lladhi ra’aytuhu fī (a)ṣ-ṣaffi ’amsi ğā’ibun al-yawma
- "The boy I saw in class yesterday is missing today". (relative pronoun present)
- hāḏā waladun ra’aytu-hu fī (a)ṣ-ṣaffi ’amsi
- "This is a boy I saw in class yesterday". (relative pronoun absent)
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:
- alwalad illi shuftō fi (a)ssaff embārih ghāyeb alyōm
- hāda walad illi shuftō fi (a)ssaff embārih
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
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 verbAttributive verb
In grammar, an attributive verb is a verb which modifies a noun as an attributive, rather than expressing an independent idea as a predicate....
, occupying the same syntactic space as an attributive adjective (before the noun phrase).
- この おいしい 天ぷら
- kono oishii tempura
- "this delicious tempuraTempura], is a Japanese dish of seafood or vegetables that have been battered and deep fried.-Batter:A light batter is made of cold water and soft wheat flour . Eggs, baking soda or baking powder, starch, oil, and/or spices may also be added...
"
- 姉が 作った 天ぷら
- ane-ga tsukutta tempura
- sister-SUBJ make-PAST tempura
- "the tempura [that] my sister made"
- 天ぷらを 食べた 人
- tempura-o tabeta hito
- tempura-OBJ eat-PAST person
- "the person who ate the tempura"
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:
- 光っている ビル
- hikatte-iru biru
- lit-be building
- "an illuminated building"
- 濡れている 犬
- nurete-iru inu
- be_wet-be dog
- "a wet dog"
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.
- 紅茶を 淹れる ために お湯を 沸かした やかん
- kōcha-o ireru tame ni oyu-o wakashita yakan
- tea-OBJ make purpose for hot-water-OBJ boiled kettle
- "the kettle I boiled water in for tea"
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.
- 天ぷらを 作った 人
- tempura-o tsukutta hito
- tempura-OBJ made person "the person who made the tempura" "the person [someone] made the tempura for"
In this case, (1) is the context-free interpretation of choice, but (2) is possible with the proper context.
- 僕が 記事を 書いた レストラン
- boku-ga kiji-o kaita resutoran
- I-SUBJ article-OBJ wrote restaurant "a restaurant about which I wrote an article" "a restaurant in which I wrote an article"
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.
Georgian
In GeorgianGeorgian language
Georgian is the native language of the Georgians and the official language of Georgia, a country in the Caucasus.Georgian is the primary language of about 4 million people in Georgia itself, and of another 500,000 abroad...
, 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 Tbilisi Tbilisi is the capital and the largest city of Georgia, lying on the banks of the Mt'k'vari River. The name is derived from an early Georgian form T'pilisi and it was officially known as Tiflis until 1936... " |
||||||
| 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 Tbilisi Tbilisi is the capital and the largest city of Georgia, lying on the banks of the Mt'k'vari River. The name is derived from an early Georgian form T'pilisi and it was officially known as Tiflis until 1936... " |
|||||||
| 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 Tbilisi Tbilisi is the capital and the largest city of Georgia, lying on the banks of the Mt'k'vari River. The name is derived from an early Georgian form T'pilisi and it was officially known as Tiflis until 1936... " |
||||||
Tagalog
TagalogTagalog language
Tagalog is an Austronesian language spoken as a first language by a third of the population of the Philippines and as a second language by most of the rest. It is the first language of the Philippine region IV and of Metro Manila...
uses the gapping strategy to form relative clauses, with the complementiser
Complementizer
In linguistics , a complementizer is a syntactic category roughly equivalent to the term subordinating conjunction in traditional grammar. For example, the word that is generally called a complementizer in English sentences like Mary believes that it is raining...
, 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 | .gave | rice | child | ||||||
| "man that gave rice to the child" | |||||||||
| b. | Nagbigay | ang | lalaki | ng | bigas | sa | bata. | ||
| .gave | man | rice | 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 | .gave | man | child | |||||||
| for: "rice that the man gave to the child" | ||||||||||
| b. | * | bata | =ng | nagbigay | ang | lalaki | ng | bigas | ____ | |
| rice | .gave | man | 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 | .gave | man | 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 | gave. | man | 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 |
| .gave | rice | child | man | ||||
| "man that gave rice to the child" | |||||||
| (5) | a. | nagbigay | na | lalaki | ng | bigas | sa | bata |
| .gave | man | rice | child | |||||
| "man that gave rice to the child" | ||||||||
| b. | nagbigay | ng | bigas | na | lalaki | sa | bata | |
| .gave | rice | man | 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
Possession (linguistics)
Possession, in the context of linguistics, is an asymmetric relationship between two constituents, the referent of one of which possesses the referent of the other ....
of a noun phrase within the relative clause.
| (6) | bata | =ng | nasugatan | ang | daliri | ____ |
| child | injured. | 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
Oblique case
An oblique case in linguistics is a noun case of synthetic languages that is used generally when a noun is the object of a verb or a preposition...
noun phrase.
| (7) | a. | ospital | (na) | kung | saan | ipinanganak | si | Juan |
| hospital | where | .bore | Juan | |||||
| "house where Juan was born" | ||||||||
| b. | Nagtanong | siya | kung | saan | ipinanganak | si | Juan. | |
| .asked | where | .bore | Juan | |||||
| "She asked where Juan was born." | ||||||||
| c. | Ipinanganak | si | Juan | sa | ospital. | |||
| .bore | Juan | hospital | ||||||
| "Juan was born at the hospital." | ||||||||
| d. | Saan | ipinanganak | si | Juan? | ||||
| where | .bore | 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
Indirect speech
In grammar, indirect or reported speech is a way of reporting a statement or question. A reported question is called an indirect question. Unlike direct speech, indirect speech does not phrase the statement or question the way the original speaker did; instead, certain grammatical categories are...
question, complete with the interrogative complementiser, kung 'if', and a pre-verbally positioned WH-word
Interrogative word
In linguistics, an interrogative word is a function word used for the item interrupted in an information statement. Interrogative words are sometimes called wh-words because most of English interrogative words start with wh-...
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
Dependent clause
In linguistics, a dependent clause is a clause that augments an independent clause with additional information, but which cannot stand alone as a sentence. Dependent clauses modify the independent clause of a sentence or serve as a component of it...
indirect question in (7b).
Hawaiian
Relative clauses in HawaiianHawaiian language
The Hawaiian language is a Polynesian language that takes its name from Hawaii, the largest island in the tropical North Pacific archipelago where it developed. Hawaiian, along with English, is an official language of the state of Hawaii...
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".
Aymara
| thuquñap | punchu | ||||
| dance-INF-3POSS | poncho | ||||
| "the poncho he is dancing with" | |||||
Mandarin
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:- zhòng shuǐguǒ de nóngrén
- grow fruit (particle) farmer
- the farmer who grows fruit
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:
- tāmen zhòng de shuǐguǒ
- they grow (particle) fruit
- the fruit that they grow
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:
- jīntiān yíng de qián fù fáng zū
- today win (particle) money pay house rent
- the money that [we] won today pays the rent
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:
- zuótiān pīping de rén dōu bu zài zhèlǐ
- yesterday criticize (particle) person all not at here
- the people who criticized [others] yesterday are not all here OR the people whom [others] criticized yesterday are not all here
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:
- wŏ xiě xìn de máobǐ
- I write letter (particle) brushpen
- the brushpen I write letters with
Hawaiian Creole English
In Hawaiian Creole English, an English-based creoleCreole language
A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...
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. As in English, a relative pronoun that serves as the object of the verb in the relative clause can optionally be omitted: For example,
- Ai neva si da buk daet Lisa wen bai
- I never see the book that Lisa (past) buy
- I didn't see the book that Lisa bought
can also be expressed with the relative pronoun omitted, as
- Ai neva si da buk Lisa wen bai
- I never see the book Lisa (past) buy
- I didn't see the book Lisa bought
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:
- Get wan nada grl hu no kaen ste stil
- There's one other girl who no can stay still
- There's another girl who cannot stay still
- Get wan nada grl no kaen ste stil
- There's one other girl no can stay still
- Get wan nada grl shi no kaen ste stil
- There's one other girl she no can stay still
Gullah
In GullahGullah language
Gullah is a creole language spoken by the Gullah people , an African American population living on the Sea Islands and the coastal region of the U.S...
, 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:
- Duh him cry out so
- It him cry out so
- It's he who cries out so
- Enty duh dem shum dey?
- Ain't it them saw_him there?
- Isn't it they who saw him there?