As promised, today I’m going to be dealing with relative clauses.
A brief recap: a clause is a series of words that contains both a subject and a predicate; a clause may or may not be independent (a sentence).
Relative clauses are dependent, they identify the nouns they modify, and they often immediately follow the nouns or pronouns that they modify.
As dependent clauses, they never stand on their own as a sentence.
Identifying the noun:
Like adjectival prepositional phrases, relative clauses answer questions like “what kind?” and “which one?”
So: The washing machine broke again.
This is a straightforward sentence; it has the traditional subject/verb construction; it is in the active voice; and it has one modifier, again, an adverb modifying “broke.”
Well, which washing machine? what kind of washing machine is it?
The washing machine, which I hate with all my heart, broke again.
The relative clause, beginning with a relative pronoun, modifies “washing machine” (more specifically, “machine”). It tells us either which machine (possibly there are several so it is the specific one I hate), or what kind (the category of machines I hate). Also, it is a clause; it has a subject and a verb, and in this case, a direct object. If we were to write the relative clause as we do normal sentences (subject / verb / direct object) it would look like this: I hate which with all my heart. Of course this is awkward and we’d never use it, but it allows you to see how the relative clause works grammatically.
The word(s) that the relative clause modify are called the antecedent. (“Ante-” meaning before). So the antecedent to our relative clause is “machine.”
Notice that the first word in the relative clause almost always the relative pronoun whose antecedent is the noun it modifies.
Common relative pronouns (or pronouns that can also be used as relative pronouns) include: which, that, what, who, whom, and whose. On occasion, relative clauses can lead with relative adverbs: when, where, and why. For example: The closing ceremony will be held in the gym where we first gathered. Here, the modifying clause is “where we first gathered” and adds more information to “gym.”
The choice of relative pronoun (do I use which? do I use that?) is based on the content of the sentence. Rather than explain it, I’ll just refer you to Melissa’s awesome post about it here.
Relative clauses, like prepositional phrases and single-word adjectives, give us ways of adding information for our audience. They allow us to collapse multiple pieces of info into one sentence. For example: “The books are missing. They are the books that were on the table.” Lots of unnecessarily repeated info there! How about “The books, which were on the table, are missing!”
Next time, I’m going to start a series of posts about words and how we can break them down into their parts and rebuild them, and how we can make up our own words.
Source:
http://ift.tt/1Eh3eXv