English grammar - Roger Berry 2012

B10.2 The position and word order of relative clauses
B10 Relative clauses
Section B Development

The relative clause is placed next to the noun which it is postmodifying. This noun is called the ’antecedent’:

I have seen the film which won the Oscar.

In all of the examples above the relative clause has been placed at the end of the sentence because the antecedent is the head noun of the predicative or object of the main clause, i.e. it is part of the last noun phrase. However, the antecedent can be the subject of the main clause, in which case the relative clause interrupts the main clause:

Anybody who passes this point must show identification.

Such ’embedded’ relative clauses are less common than those at the end. In some cases a long relative clause with a subject antecedent may be placed at the end of a sentence, separated from its antecedent:

The soldier is dead who I thought was in love with me.

But this is not considered correct.

It is not only the position of the relative clause that is important; the relative pronoun must also be placed next to the antecedent (with some exceptions - see below). When the relative pronoun represents the subject, there will be no change to the word order. However, if it represents the object (direct, indirect or prepositional) the word order will be different because the object will come first:

I saw the teacher that you like.

Here the relative clause structure is OSV; the object relative pronoun that has been placed at the start of the relative clause to be next to the antecedent. As we saw above, in such a case the pronoun may be left out:

I saw the teacher you like.

In this example the teacher may be considered both (part of) the direct object (of saw) in the main clause and the direct object (of like) in the relative clause.

With a prepositional object, the preposition may either be placed at the start of the relative clause along with the pronoun:

Is this the text to which you were referring?

or, more normally, be ’stranded’ at the end of the clause:

Is this the text which you were referring to?

The relative pronoun may be part of a phrase, all of which is placed at the start:

The audience, most of whom were women, were not impressed.

Police found a large sum of money, the source of which is unknown.

In this second example we could also say whose source is unknown.

Activity B10.3

Analyse the clause structure of both the main and relative clauses in this sentence.

This is the student whose essay I sent you.

Defining and non-defining relative clauses

One distinction that applies to all relatives is between defining and non-defining relative clauses (also called restrictive and non-restrictive):

The man who we recognised was a robber. (defining)

The man, who we recognised, was a robber. (non-defining)

In the first example, the relative clause distinguishes the ’man’ from all others; in the second it merely describes him. The use of commas around a non-defining relative clauses is typical in writing, as above. In non-defining relative clauses that is not used: ’The man, that we recognised, was the robber.’ And object relative pronouns cannot be omitted: ’The man, we recognised, was the robber.’