INTRODUCTION TO
RELATIVE CLAUSES
INTRODUCTION
You’ll need to know a great deal about relative clauses as a teacher of ESL EFI This construction is—first and foremost –a type of complex postnominal adjectival modifier used in both written and spoken English. For example:
San Antonio is a city that has experienced very rapid growth.
In this example, the italicized relative clause gives us additional information about San Antonio.In English it would be very awkward, even ungrammatical, to convey the same information using an attributive adjective phrase:
*San Antonio is an experiencing very rapid growth city.
It would be possible, but more wordy and less elegant, to express the same information as two independent clauses:
San Antonio is a type of city; it has experienced very rapid growth.
Relative clauses thus give us a means to encode complex adjectival modifiers that are easier to process than complex attributive structures and that are less wordy than two independent clauses.
In this chapter we will consider the form, meaning, and function of restrictive relative clauses like the one in the example above. The other major type of relative clause. The nonrestrictive type, will be dealt with in the following chapter along with some other relative clause constructions.
THE FORM OF RELATIVE CLAUSES
A relative clause derives from a basic structure consisting of more than one sentence. Actually, as early as Chapter 5, and then again in Chapter 25, you saw that one basic structure sentence could be subordinated to another when preceded by an adverbial subordinator; for example:
The baby walked before she crawled.
(S1 + adv sub + S2)
This, of course, was also the type of subordinate structure we used to derive some of the conditional sentences in the preceding chapter.