relative pronoun is a pronoun that marks a relative clause within a larger sentence. It is called a relative pronoun because it relates the relative (and hence subordinate) clause to the noun that it modifies. In English, the relative pronouns are: who, whom, whose, whoever, whosesoever, which, and, in some treatments, that. In addition, English has various fused relative pronouns, which combine in one word the antecedent and the relative pronoun: what, whatever, whatsoever, whoever, whosoever, whomever, whomsoever, whichever, and whichsoever,
A relative pronoun links two clauses into a single complex clause. It is similar in function to a subordinating conjunction. Unlike a conjunction, however, a relative pronoun stands in place of a noun. Compare:
- (1) This is a house. Jack built this house.
- (2) This is the house that Jack built.
Sentence (2) consists of two clauses, a main clause (This is the house) and a relative clause (that Jack built). The word that is a relative pronoun in some analyses.[1] Within the relative clause, the relative pronoun stands for the noun phrase it references in the main clause (its antecedent), and is one of the arguments of the verb in the relative clause. In the example, the argument is the house, the direct object of built.
Other arguments can be relativised using relative pronouns:
- Subject: Hunter is the boy who kissed Jessica.
- Indirect object: Hunter is the boy to whom Jessica gave a gift./Hunter is the boy who Jessica gave a gift to.
- Adpositional complement: Jack built the house in which I now live. (similarly with prepositions and prepositional phrases in general, for example These are the walls in between which Jack ran.)
- Possessor: Jack is the boy whose friend built my house.
In some languages, such as German and Latin, which have gender, number, and noun declensions, the relative pronoun agrees with its antecedent in gender and number, while its case indicates its relationship with the verb in the relative clause. In some other languages, the relative pronoun is an invariable word.
The words used as relative pronouns are often words which originally had other functions: for example, the English which is also an interrogative word. This suggests that relative pronouns might be a fairly late development in many languages. Some languages, such as Welsh, do not have relative pronouns.
In English and German, different pronouns are sometimes used if the antecedent is a human being, as opposed to a non-human or an inanimate object (as in who/that).
- (5) This is a bank. This bank accepted my identification.
- (6) She is a bank teller. She helped us open an account.
With the relative pronouns, sentences (5) and (6) would read like this:
- (7) This is the bank that accepted my identification.
- (8) She is the bank teller who helped us open an account.
In sentences (7) and (8), the words that and who are the relative pronouns. The word that is used because the bank is a thing; the word who is used because "she" is a person.
In some languages with relative clauses, such as Mandarin Chinese, there are no relative pronouns. In English, the relative pronoun may be optionally omitted, particularly in speech, from a restrictive relative clause — that is, one which contributes to establishing the identity of the antecedent — if the relative pronoun would serve as the object of the verb or of a stranded preposition in the relative clause (as in This is the car I bought = This is the car that I bought or This is the car you heard of = This is the car of which you heard).
Relative pronoun type
This is in fact a type of gapped relative clause, but is distinguished by the fact that the role of the shared noun in the embedded clause is indicated indirectly by the case marking of the marker (the relative pronoun) used to join the main and embedded clauses. All languages which use relative pronouns have them in clause-initial position: though one could conceivably imagine a clause-final relative pronoun analogous to an adverbial subordinator in that position, they are unknown.
Note that some languages have what are described as "relative pronouns" (in that they agree with some properties of the head noun, such as number and gender) but which don't actually indicate the case role of the shared noun in the embedded clause. Classical Arabic in fact has "relative pronouns" which are case-marked, but which agree in case with the head noun. Case-marked relative pronouns in the strict sense are almost entirely confined to European languages[citation needed], where they are widespread except among the Celtic family and Indo-Aryan family. The influence of Spanish has led to their adaption by a very small number of Native American languages, of which the best-known are the Keresan languages.[3]
[edit]Pronoun retention type
In this type, the position relativized is indicated by means of a personal pronoun in the same syntactic position as would ordinarily be occupied by a noun phrase of that type in the main clause — known as a resumptive pronoun. It is equivalent to saying "The man who I saw him yesterday went home". Pronoun retention is very frequently used for relativization of inaccessible positions on the accessibility hierarchy. In Persian and Classical Arabic, for example, resumptive pronouns are required when the embedded role is other than the subject or direct object, and optional in the case of the direct object. Resumptive pronouns are common in non-verb-final languages of Africa and Asia, and also used by the Celtic languages of northwest Europe and Romanian ("Omul pe care l-am văzut ieri a mers acasă"/"The man who I saw him yesterday went home"). They also occur in deeply embedded positions in English, as in "That's the girl that I don't know what shedid",[4] although this is sometimes considered non-standard.
Only a very small number of languages, of which the best known is Yoruba, have pronoun retention as their sole grammatical type of relative clause.
