Relative Clauses

Understanding and using relative clauses


Using relative clauses often causes considerable concern for non-native speakers of English – so much so that they are often avoided completely. But they exist for an important reason; in English you cannot pre-modify important nouns very much – that is, you cannot place complex modifications before the noun. You have to put such modifications after the noun – and that is what relative clauses are for. In some languages, and Chinese is one, you can pre-modify a noun in an extensive and complex way but this is not possible in English as the following example shows:


Key noun
relative clause
main clause

People
who live in downtown areas
are often very poor.



The Chinese transliteration of this would be:


Adjectival clause
key noun
complement

Live in downtown areas
people
often very poor.





Avoiding the use of relative clauses in your writing will limit you to simple structures which are unlikely to be adequate to express complex ideas and which will detract from the overall style of your writing.


Relative clauses usually begin with the pronouns who, that, and which. These pronouns refer back to the key noun in a sentence. Look at the example:


Standard sentence: We call this fruit a lemon

Sentence with relative clause: This is the fruit that we call a lemon.


However, when the relative noun is not the subject of the relative clause, the pronoun is normally omitted. You can see that we is the subject of the relative clause, so it’s possible to omit the pronoun:


This is the fruit we call a lemon.


A clause with a deleted relative pronoun is known as a ‘contact’ clause.


'That' is usually less formal than who, which, etc