A relative pronoun is a
pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not co ...
that marks a
relative clause
A relative clause is a clause that modifies a noun or noun phraseRodney D. Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum, ''A Student's Introduction to English Grammar'', CUP 2005, p. 183ff. and uses some grammatical device to indicate that one of the arguments ...
. It serves the purpose of conjoining modifying information about an antecedent
referent
A referent () is a person or thing to which a name – a linguistic expression or other symbol – refers. For example, in the sentence ''Mary saw me'', the referent of the word ''Mary'' is the particular person called Mary who is being spoken of, ...
.
An example is the word ''which'' in the sentence "This is the house which Jack built." Here the relative pronoun ''which'' conjoins the relative clause "Jack built," which modifies the noun ''house'' in the main sentence. ''Which'' has an
anaphoric relationship to its
antecedent "house" in the main clause.
In the English language, the following are the most common relative pronouns: ''which'', ''that'', ''whose'', ''whoever'', ''whomever'', ''who'' and ''whom''.
According to some
dependency grammar
Dependency grammar (DG) is a class of modern grammatical theories that are all based on the dependency relation (as opposed to the ''constituency relation'' of phrase structure) and that can be traced back primarily to the work of Lucien Tesni ...
theories, a relative pronoun does not simply mark the subordinate (relative) clause but also may be considered to play the role of a noun within that clause. For example, in the relative clause "that Jack built," "that" is deemed a pronoun functioning as the
object
Object may refer to:
General meanings
* Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept
** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place
** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter
* Goal, an ...
of the verb "built." Compare this with "Jack built the house after he married," where the conjunction ''after'' marks the subordinate clause ''after he married'', but does not play the role of any noun within that clause.
In a relative clause, a relative pronoun takes the number (singular or plural) and the person (first, second or third) of its antecedent.
For more information on the formation and uses of relative clauses—with and without relative pronouns—see
Relative clause
A relative clause is a clause that modifies a noun or noun phraseRodney D. Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum, ''A Student's Introduction to English Grammar'', CUP 2005, p. 183ff. and uses some grammatical device to indicate that one of the arguments ...
. For detailed information about relative clauses and relative pronouns in English, see
English relative clause.
Antecedents
The element in the main clause that the relative pronoun in the relative clause stands for (''house'' in the above example) is the
''antecedent'' of that pronoun. In most cases the antecedent is a nominal (noun or noun phrase), though the pronoun can also refer to a whole
proposition
In logic and linguistics, a proposition is the meaning of a declarative sentence. In philosophy, " meaning" is understood to be a non-linguistic entity which is shared by all sentences with the same meaning. Equivalently, a proposition is the no ...
, as in "The train was late, which annoyed me greatly", where the antecedent of the relative pronoun ''which'' is the clause "The train was late" (the thing that annoyed me was the fact of the train's being late).
In a
free relative clause
A relative clause is a clause that modifies a noun or noun phraseRodney D. Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum, ''A Student's Introduction to English Grammar'', CUP 2005, p. 183ff. and uses some grammatical device to indicate that one of the arguments ...
, a relative pronoun has no antecedent: the relative clause itself plays the role of the co-referring element in the main clause. For example, in "I like what you did", ''what'' is a relative pronoun, but without an antecedent. The clause ''what you did'' itself plays the role of a nominal (the object of ''like'') in the main clause. A relative pronoun used this way is sometimes called a fused relative pronoun, since the antecedent appears fused into the pronoun (''what'' in this example can be regarded as a fusion of ''that which'').
Absence
Only about 7% of the languages around the world have relative pronouns. For example,
Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language of ...
does not have relative pronouns at all and forms relative clauses (or their equivalents)
by different methods.
Even within languages that have relative pronouns, not all relative clauses contain relative pronouns. For example, in the English sentence "The man you saw yesterday was my uncle", the relative clause ''you saw yesterday'' contains no relative pronoun. It can be said to have a gap, or
zero
0 (zero) is a number representing an empty quantity. In place-value notation
Positional notation (or place-value notation, or positional numeral system) usually denotes the extension to any base of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system (or ...
, in the position of the object of the verb ''saw''.
Role
Other arguments can be relativised using relative pronouns:
;Subject: ''Hunter is the boy who helped Jessica.''
;Object complement: ''Hunter is the boy whom Jessica gave a gift to.''
;Prepositional object: ''Jack built the house in which I now live.'' (Similarly with prepositions and prepositional phrases in general, for example, ''These are the walls between which Jack ran.'')
;Possessor: ''Jack is the boy whose friend built my house.''
Variant forms
In some languages with
gender
Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most cultures u ...
,
number
A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers c ...
, and noun
declension
In linguistics, declension (verb: ''to decline'') is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection. Declensions may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and ar ...
s—such as
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
**Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ger ...
,
Serbo-Croatian
Serbo-Croatian () – also called Serbo-Croat (), Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and ...
,
Hindi
Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been de ...
, and
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
—the relative pronoun agrees with its antecedent in gender and number, while its
case indicates its relationship with the verb in the relative or main clause. In some other languages, the relative pronoun is an invariable word.
Words used as relative pronouns often originally had other functions. For example, the English ''which'' is also an
interrogative word
An interrogative word or question word is a function word used to ask a question, such as ''what, which'', ''when'', ''where'', ''who, whom, whose'', ''why'', ''whether'' and ''how''. They are sometimes called wh-words, because in English most o ...
. This suggests that relative pronouns might be a fairly late development in many languages. Some languages, such as
Welsh
Welsh may refer to:
Related to Wales
* Welsh, referring or related to Wales
* Welsh language, a Brittonic Celtic language spoken in Wales
* Welsh people
People
* Welsh (surname)
* Sometimes used as a synonym for the ancient Britons (Celtic peop ...
, have no relative pronouns. In some languages such as
Hindi
Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been de ...
, the relative pronouns are distinct from the interrogative pronouns.
In English, 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'' vs. ''that'').
:(1) ''This is a bank. This bank accepted my identification.''
:(2) ''She is a bank teller. She helped us open an account.''
With the relative pronouns, sentences (1) and (2) would read like this:
:(3) ''This is the bank that accepted my identification.''
:(4) ''She is the bank teller who helped us open an account.''
In sentences (3) and (4), 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 the teller is a person. Alternatively, ''which'' is often used in ''defining'' (or ''restrictive'') relative clauses in either case. For details see
English relative clauses
Relative clauses in the English language are formed principally by means of relative pronouns. The basic relative pronouns are ''who'', ''which'', and ''that''; ''who'' also has the derived forms ''whom'' and ''whose''. Various grammatical rules an ...
.
See also
*
Relativizer In linguistics, a relativizer (abbreviated ) is a type of conjunction that introduces a relative clause. For example, in English, the conjunction ''that'' may be considered a relativizer in a sentence such as "I have one that you can use."Fox, Bar ...
*
Relative pronouns in Spanish
References
Bibliography
* Gregory R. Guy and Robert Bayley,
On the Choice of Relative Pronouns in English, in ''American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage'', 70.2 (1995), pp. 148-62.
* Iliev, Iv., The Origin of Bulgarian Relative Pronouns
* Soojin Lee, "''That'' or ''Which''?: The ''that’s that'' of ''which is which'', published in 2006, http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/courses/6362-lee.htm
*
ContentsSummary
{{DEFAULTSORT:Relative Pronoun
Pronouns