Relative clauses

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:

1. How the role of the shared noun phrase is indicated in the embedded clause.
2. How the two clauses are joined together.
3. 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:

1. 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).
2. The clauses are joined by the complementizer "that".
3. 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 clause. One possibility in English. Used inArabic when the head noun is indefinite, as in "a man" instead of "the man".)
• "The man [whom I saw yesterday] went home". (A relative pronoun indicating the role of the shared noun in the embedded clause — in this case, the direct object. Used in formal English, as in Latin, German or Russian.)
• "The man [seen by me yesterday] went home". (A reduced relative clause, in this case passivized. One possibility in English.)
• "The man [that I saw him yesterday] went home". (A complementizer linking the two sentences with a resumptive pronoun indicating the role of the shared noun in the embedded clause, as in Arabic, Hebrew or Persian.)
• "The man [that him I saw yesterday] went home". (Similar to the previous, but with the resumptive pronoun fronted. This occurs in modern Greek and as one possibility in modern Hebrew; 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 construction — to link the relative clause to the head noun. This occurs in Chinese 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 Japanese.)
• "The man [of my seeing yesterday] went home". (Nominalized relative clause, as in Turkish.)
• "[Which man I saw yesterday], that man went home". (A correlative structure, as in Hindi.)
• "[I saw the man yesterday] went home." (An unreduced, internally-headed relative clause, as in Tibetan or Navajo.)

[edit]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:

1. Gap strategy or gapped relative clause
2. Relative pronoun
3. Pronoun retention
4. Nonreduction