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The English relative words are words in English used to mark a clause, noun phrase or preposition phrase as relative. The central relative words in English include who , whom , whose , which , why , and while , as shown in the following examples, each of which has the relative clause in bold:
The adverbial clause describes when and where the action of the main clause, I had only two things on my mind, took place. A relative clause is a dependent clause that modifies a noun or noun phrase in the independent clause. In other words, the relative clause functions similar to an adjective. Let him who has been deceived complain.
Relative clauses in English usually have gapping. For example, in the sentence "This is the man that I saw", there is a gap after the word saw. The shared noun phrase the man is understood to fill that gap ("I saw [the man]"). However, gapless relative clauses occur in non-standard English. One form of gapless relatives uses a resumptive pronoun.
The first published English grammar was a Pamphlet for Grammar of 1586, written by William Bullokar with the stated goal of demonstrating that English was just as rule-based as Latin. Bullokar's grammar was faithfully modeled on William Lily's Latin grammar, Rudimenta Grammatices (1534), used in English schools at that time, having been ...
If in English a relative clause would have a copula and an adjective, in Hawaiian the antecedent is simply modified by the adjective: "The honest man" instead of "the man who is honest". If the English relative clause would have a copula and a noun, in Hawaiian an appositive is used instead: "Paul, an apostle" instead of "Paul, who was an apostle".
The earliest use of the word clause in Middle English is non-technical and similar to the current everyday meaning of phrase: "A sentence or clause, a brief statement, a short passage, a short text or quotation; in a ~, briefly, in short; (b) a written message or letter; a story; a long passage in an author's source."
Whiz deletion is analyzed by Langendoen as a transformational reduction of relative clauses [1]: 145–147 [2] that—together with another transformation, which moves adjectives in front of the noun phrases they modify—explains many occurrences of attributive adjectives. On this analysis, for example, whiz deletion transforms the sentence
In an ordinary English clause, the subject is normally the same as the topic/theme (example 1), even in the passive voice (where the subject is a patient, not an agent: example 2): The dog bit the little girl. The little girl was bitten by the dog. These clauses have different topics: the first is about the dog, and the second about the little ...