Relative Pronouns

6 Key excerpts on "Relative Pronouns"

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  The Acquisition of Sociolinguistic Competence in a Lingua Franca Context

  • Mercedes Durham(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Multilingual Matters

    (Publisher)

  free variation . By this, I mean that the non-native speakers are simply taught that several pronouns are acceptable in the same situation. The aim of the present analysis is then two-fold; it will focus on establishing the extent to which the non-native speakers differ from the prescribed norm (so their level of learning-related variation), while at the same time judging how closely they follow the variable norms (i.e. target-based variation).

  Considering a feature such as this one, where the variability is only partially taught, will make it possible to determine to what extent non-native speakers are aware of and capable of dealing with variable rule patterns. Because the full variable rules are not taught, if the non-native speakers have acquired them, then it must be by modelling the native speakers.

  The categorical restrictions on relative pronoun choice are presented directly below, while those which are merely preferences in terms of relative pronoun selection, and as such belong to native speaker variable rules, will be examined in the Section 7.6 , which also deals with the extraction and coding of the tokens.

  7.2 Relative Clauses

  Relative clauses fulfil similar functions to conjunctions and serve to link two or more clauses together (Quirk et al. , 1985: 1244ff). The two clauses in

  (3) are joined together in (4): (3) I saw the man. The man was wearing a red hat. (4) (a) I saw the man who was wearing a red hat.

  (b) The man whom I saw was wearing a red hat.1

  English has a number of different Relative Pronouns (who , whom , which , that , when , why , where , whose ), as well as a zero form. Examples 5–9 illustrate the use of some of these pronouns with data from the Swiss emails.

  (5) i've found someone who is willing to do the homepage. (h, German, email)

  (6) I need deans, professors, doctors to whom you have a good contact. (c, Italian, email)

  (7) I think this is a good opportunity to enlarge our activities, especially with the help of an organization which is already settled. (b, Italian, email)

  (8) Despite the incredible tiredness that

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  A Comprehensive and Comparative Grammar of English Creoles

  • Anand Syea(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Quirk et al. 1985 ) or traditionally as contact relatives. It would be reasonable to assume that zero relatives also begin with a relative pronoun except that it is phonologically null.

  It is also worth pointing out that the relative clause in zero relatives does not have to be finite. It can be infinitival as in the book to read for the test is this one, the surgeon to perform this operation is Bill, the place to have a picnic is right here, the reason for him to leave is clear.

  Restrictive relative constructions in English can therefore surface with a wh-relative pronoun (e.g., who, which, where, and so on), the complementizer that, or without either.

  11.2.2 Non-restrictive Relative Clauses

  A non-restrictive or appositive relative construction is one in which the relative clause is separated from the head and the rest of the sentence by means of comma intonation (in speech) and commas (in writing): the book, which you asked me about, was in the library or the woman, who you said Mary visited, died yesterday. In such sentences, the relative clause provides additional (secondary) information to the information given in the rest of the sentence. Contrastingly, restrictive relative clauses are integral to the meaning of the sentence in that the information that they provide is essential to the description of the head noun book and woman in the above examples.

  Semantically, non-restrictive relatives differ from restrictive relatives in that they never pick out a subset of the entities denoted by the head noun, whereas restrictive relatives do. This difference is clear when we compare Students who have no part-time work struggle to live on their loans with Students, who have no private income, struggle to live on their loans

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  A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles

  Volume 3

  • Otto Jespersen(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  what you say. I have mentioned other objections to Sweet's view in PG 104, and shall here add that in the following paragraphs (221ff.) he creates a new and entirely unnecessary category of 'conjunctive pronouns', because he does not see clearly the difference between a relative and a dependent interrogative clause. But let us now turn to the grammatical facts instead of further criticizing the views of other grammarians.

  3.2. It will be noticed that the relative word itself may fill different functions in the clause, entirely independent of the function of the clause itself: in the sentences marked (A) in 3.11 the relative is an adjunct.

  A particularly interesting case is found when the relative pronoun is governed by a preposition at the end of the clause, while the whole clause is the object of a preceding preposition (cp interrogative clauses 2.54 ):

  Sh H 5 I 2.19 in approbation Of what your reuerence shall incite vs to | id Gent II 7.84 To take a note of what I stand in need of | Massinger N IV 3.25 being dispossesst of what it longs for | Swift 3.111 I was able to call for whatever I had a mind to | Ru S 32 I had been writing of what I knew nothing about | Galsw Ca 163 his glance travelled to the heart of what it rested on | ib 460 nothing would ever turn him from acquisition of what he had set his heart on.

  Where, however, it is the same preposition that should be used both before and inside the clause, it is sometimes put only once (cf 2.54 , 10.52 ):

  Latimer (Spec 3.XXI. 273) He should therfore gyue it ouer to whom it is meete | Sh H4A III 4.3 beare ... all the rest To whom they are directed | AV Rom 9.18 Therefore hath hee mercie on whom hee will haue mercy | ib 13.7 Render therfore . . . tribute to whom tribute is due | Keats 2.149 Now comes the pain of truth, to whom 'tis pain | Sh Oth II 2.7 each man to what sport and reuels his addition leads him.

  3.31 .

  Who (with, whoever , etc.) is the only one of these pronouns that has a separate oblique case-form whom (whomever ). The general relation between the two case-forms as well as the conflict between the natural instinct, which has for centuries tended to use the form who

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  Universal Grammar

  • Edward L. Keenan(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Any language which has relative clauses must provide some strategy to identify the role that the head noun phrase plays in the subordinate sentence, or else the relative clauses would be intolerably ambiguous — and we would not be able to distinguish the referents of ‘the girl that John loves’ and ‘the girl that loves John’. We stress that identifying the position relativised into by the head noun is logically important, for only if the position is known can we clearly determine the sentence which must be true of the objects specified by the head noun, and thus understand the reference of the entire relative clause.

  Logically we have solved this problem marking the positions relativised into with pronouns that match the index on the head noun phrase. It does not appear however that natural languages avail themselves of exactly this solution. Some languages, e.g. Czech,2 Hadza,3 do present sentences containing full noun phrases together with co-referential pronouns with which they form a constituent. But we know of no language which regularly retains these indexical pronouns in noun phrases which occur as head noun phrases of relative clauses.

  Co-reference in natural language is not generally indicated by matching pronouns with pronominal indices of nouns. But co-reference is normally indicated by matching pronouns with the noun class and subclass of noun phrases. Such referencing power varies considerably across languages. Some, e.g. Malagasy, possess essentially only one third person subject pronoun. Others, such as English, possess a few, he, she, it, they. And some Bantu languages may possess upwards of 10 to 15, as weak pronouns may agree in noun class and number with the head noun. Luganda for example has 16 distinct weak subject-pro-forms.

  One quite general solution to the strategy problem for relative clauses then is illustrated by languages which retain a personal pronoun in the position of the subordinate sentence relativised into. Our current research indicates that languages in which pronoun retention is a major strategy (used in relativisation in major noun phrase positions in simplex sentences) fall naturally into two groups: a strong group which includes modern Hebrew, modern Arabic, Welsh, Persian4 and to some extent Batak,5 and a weak

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  A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish

  • John B. Butt, Carmen Benjamin, Moreira-Rodriguez Antonia(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Relative clauses and Relative Pronouns The main topics discussed in this chapter are:

  •Forms of Relative Pronouns and adjectives (Section 39.1.1 )

  •Definition of ‘restrictive’ and ‘non-restrictive’ relative clauses (Section 39.1.2 )

  •The uses of que as a relative pronoun (Section 39.2 )

  •Relative Pronouns in non-restrictive relative clauses (Section 39.3 )

  •Relative Pronouns after prepositions (Section 39.4 )

  •Remarks on individual Relative Pronouns and adjectives: el cual (39.5), lo cual and lo que (39.6), cuyo (39.7)

  •Donde, como and cuando used to form relative clauses (Sections 39.10 –12 )

  •The subjunctive in relative clauses (Section 39.15 )

  For word order in relative clauses see 42.2 .

  39.1 General

  There are four Relative Pronouns and a relative adjective in Spanish: que, quien(es), el que, el cual and cuyo. These introduce relative clauses like the English Relative Pronouns ‘that’, ‘who(m)’, ‘which’ and ‘whose’ as in ‘the book that I read’, ‘the woman that/who(m) we saw’, ‘the book that/which I’m talking about’, ‘students whose grades are satisfactory’, etc.

  (1) Important: Spanish Relative Pronouns and adjectives are never written with an accent.

  39.1.1 Forms of Relative Pronouns and adjectives

  Quien has a plural quienes but no separate feminine form. Que is invariable. El que, el cual and cuyo agree in number and gender, as follows:

  (1) Agreement is with the noun referred to: el bolígrafo con el que firmaron ‘the ballpoint pen they signed with’, las ruinas entre las cuales encontraron el amuleto ‘the ruins among which they found the amulet’.

  (2) When it is used as a relative pronoun, el que is found after prepositions, e.g. el restaurante en el que cenamos ‘the restaurant in which we had dinner’/‘the restaurant we had dinner in’ (it has other uses as a nominalizer, explained in Chapter 40 ).

  (3) Cuando, donde

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  Talking About People

  • Peter Broeder(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  The deixis-anaphora distinction was rediscovered by the Indo-European scholars in the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, and influenced in particular Bühler's work (1934). In his Organon Model of Communication Bühler introduced what he calls a “pointing” field within which the referents of a linguistic sign may be located. The pointing field is made up of physical/imagined objects or states of affairs. The linguistic sign can be divided into pointing words and denoting words. Denoting words (such as nouns) have a constant, situation independent relationship to the referent. In contrast, pointing words select their referents relative to the situation from the pointing field. The class of pointing words can be used for two ways of pointing: “objectual” pointing which concerns reference to objects or states of affairs in the external world, e.g. This I would like to offer you, and “syntactic” pointing which concerns elements of the linguistic context, e.g. This worries me: the deterioration of the ozone layer. Bosch (1983: 11) remarks that Bühler is wrong in claiming that the two ways of pointing are similar to the classical deixis-anaphora distinction. In fact, Apollonius distinguished reference to given vs. new information within the linguistic discourse, whereas Bühler dealt with reference within the linguistic discourse vs. reference to the external world.

  Pronouns as substitutes

  Within Bloomfieldian structuralism (1935), pronouns are conceived as substitutes: forms which replace other elements in the linguistic discourse (in line with the classical account of Dionysius). A pronoun is defined by its domain of substitution (i.e. the class of linguistic forms which a pronoun can replace), and its substitution type (i.e. the semantic meaning of the domain of substitution). Thus the pronoun I is defined as follows: “the substitute I replaces any singular substantive expression, provided that this substantive expression denotes the speaker of the utterance in which the substitute is used” (Bloomfield 1935: 247). Within structuralism, the focus was on the anaphoric function of pronouns, i.e. on syntagmatic substitution. The same focus is found in a second influential linguistic school in the 20th century: generative grammar.

  Constraints on pronominal reference

  Chomsky (1957) introduced the concept of generative grammar. In early theories of generative grammar, called TGG, the structuralist account of pronouns as substitutes is stated in a transformation rule of pronominalization: a full-NP in deep structure is converted into a pronoun in surface structure. The transformation rule is directed towards anaphoric relations with an explicit linguistic antecedent located within the same sentence as the pronoun (e.g. Lees & Klima 1963). In recent theories of generative grammar, in the Government/Binding model (GB), the idea of transformations is abandoned (Chomsky 1981). Instead, the focus is on constraints on pronominalization. A number of binding principles restrict the possibilities of co-reference between an antecedent and a pronoun. A distinction is made between anaphors, pronominals and referring expressions (r-expressions). The latter refer to something in the world, outside the sentence, e.g. John hurts. In contrast, anaphors always have their antecedent within the same sentence, or in GB-formulation: anaphors must be bound within their governing category, e.g. John hurts himself. Finally, pronominals do not have the antecedent within the same sentence: they must be free outside their governing category, e.g. John hurts him. Generative grammar theories deal with structural properties of pronouns.

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