Relative Clause - Ways of Forming Relative Clauses

Ways of Forming Relative Clauses

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 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 went home". (Gapping strategy, with no word joining the clauses—also known as a reduced relative clause. One possibility in English. Used in Arabic when the head noun is indefinite, as in "a man" instead of "the man".)
  • "The man 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 went home". (A reduced relative clause, in this case passivized. One possibility in English.)
  • "The man 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 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 '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 man went home". (Preceding relative clause with gapping and no linking word, as in Japanese.)
  • "The man went home". (Nominalized relative clause, as in Turkish.)
  • ", that man went home". (A correlative structure, as in Hindi.)
  • " went home." (An unreduced, internally-headed relative clause, as in Tibetan or Navajo.)

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