Jumat, 08 Juni 2012

Relative Pronoun


POSSESSIVE RELATIVE PRONOUN

Similar to quantities, possessive (genitive) qualities can be used together with a relative pronoun in the adjective clause. These are usually which (things) or whose (things and people).

e.g. WE HAVE A SPANISH STYLE HOUSE. THE EXTERIOR OF THE HOUSE IS WHITE.
- WE HAVE A SPANISH STYLE HOUSE, “THE EXTERIOR OF WHICH” IS WHITE.
- WE HAVE A SPANISH STYLE HOUSE, “WHOSE EXTERIOR” IS WHITE. This is more common in American English.

e.g. SHE HAS JUST BOUGHT A NEW CAR, THE COLOR OF WHICH I HATE.
- SHE HAS JUST BOUGHT A NEW CAR, WHOSE COLOR I HATE.

e.g. THE COMPANY HIRED A NEW SALES MANAGER, WHOSE ATITUDE IS QUITE A ANNOYING.
- When talking about people, it is not common to use “which”.

Personal Pronouns

Unlike English nouns, which usually do not change form except for the addition of an -s ending to create the plural or the apostrophe + s to create the possessive, personal pronouns (which stand for persons or things) change form according to their various uses within a sentence. Thus I is used as the subject of a sentence (I am happy.), me is used as an object in various ways (He hit me. He gave me a book. Do this for me.), and my is used as the possessive form (That's my car.) The same is true of the other personal pronouns: the singular you and he/she/it and the plural we, you, and they. These forms are called cases. An easily printable chart is available that shows the various Cases of the Personal Pronouns.

Personal pronouns can also be characterized or distinguished by personFirst person refers to the speaker(s) or writer(s) ("I" for singular, "we" for plural). Second person refers to the person or people being spoken or written to ("you" for both singular and plural). Third person refers to the person or people being spoken or written about ("he," "she," and "it" for singular, "they" for plural). The person of a pronoun is also demonstrated in the chart Cases of the Personal Pronouns. As you will see there, each person can change form, reflecting its use within a sentence. Thus, "I" becomes "me" when used as an object ("She left me") and "my" when used in its possessive role (That's my car"); "they" becomes "them" in object form ("I like them") and "their" in possessive ("That's just their way").

When a personal pronoun is connected by a conjunction to another noun or pronoun, its case does not change. We would write "I am taking a course in Asian history"; if Talitha is also taking that course, we would write "Talitha and I are taking a course in Asian history." (Notice that Talitha gets listed before "I" does. This is one of the few ways in which English is a "polite" language.) The same is true when the object form is called for: "Professor Vendetti gave all her books to me"; if Talitha also received some books, we'd write "Professor Vendetti gave all her books to Talitha and me." For more on this, see cases of pronouns.

When a pronoun and a noun are combined (which will happen with the plural first- and second-person pronouns), choose the case of the pronoun that would be appropriate if the noun were not there.
  • We students are demanding that the administration give us two hours for lunch.
  • The administration has managed to put us students in a bad situation.
With the second person, we don't really have a problem because the subject form is the same as the object form, "you":
  • "You students are demanding too much."
  • "We expect you students to behave like adults."
Among the possessive pronoun forms, there is also what is called the nominative possessive: mine, yours, ours, theirs.
  • Look at those cars. Theirs is really ugly; ours is beautiful.
  • This new car is mine.
  • Mine is newer than yours.

Demonstrative Pronouns

The family of demonstratives (this/that/these/those/such) can behave either as pronouns or as determiners.
As pronouns, they identify or point to nouns.
  • That is incredible! (referring to something you just saw)
  • I will never forget this. (referring to a recent experience)
  • Such is my belief. (referring to an explanation just made)
As determiners, the demonstratives adjectivally modify a noun that follows. A sense of relative distance (in time and space) can be conveyed through the choice of these pronouns/determiners:
  • These [pancakes sitting here now on my plate] are delicious.
  • Those [pancakes that I had yesterday morning] were even better.
  • This [book in my hand] is well written;
  • that [book that I'm pointing to, over there, on the table] is trash.
A sense of emotional distance or even disdain can be conveyed with the demonstrative pronouns:
  • You're going to wear these?
  • This is the best you can do?
Pronouns used in this way would receive special stress in a spoken sentence.
When used as subjects, the demonstratives, in either singular or plural form, can be used to refer to objects as well as persons.
  • This is my father.
  • That is my book.
In other roles, however, the reference of demonstratives is non-personal. In other words, when referring to students, say, we could write "Those were loitering near the entrance during the fire drill" (as long as it is perfectly clear in context what "those" refers to). But we would not write "The principal suspended those for two days"; instead, we would have to use "those" as a determiner and write "The principal suspended those students for two days."

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 LatinGerman 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 ArabicHebrew 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