Ways of Forming Relative Clauses
Languages differ in many ways in how relative clauses are expressed:
- How the role of the shared noun phrase is indicated in the embedded clause.
- How the two clauses are joined together.
- 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:
- 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).
- The clauses are joined by the complementizer "that".
- 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.)
Read more about this topic: Relative Clause
Famous quotes containing the words ways of, ways, forming and/or relative:
“Parents have subtle ways of humbling you, of reminding you of your origins, perhaps by showing up at the moment of your greatest glory and reminding you where you came from and demonstrating that you still have some of it between your toes.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)
“As boys without bonds to their fathers grow older and more desperate about their masculinity, they are in danger of forming gangs in which they strut their masculinity for one another, often overdo it, and sometimes turn to displays of fierce, macho bravado and even violence.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“Personal change, growth, development, identity formation—these tasks that once were thought to belong to childhood and adolescence alone now are recognized as part of adult life as well. Gone is the belief that adulthood is, or ought to be, a time of internal peace and comfort, that growing pains belong only to the young; gone the belief that these are marker events—a job, a mate, a child—through which we will pass into a life of relative ease.”
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)