relative clause
1
3.9
- noun
- /ˈrɛlətɪv klɔz/
- Specialized
:
oración relativa
- The teacher explained that a relative clause can clarify which person we are talking about when it starts with 'who'.
- embedded relative clause
- center-embedded relative clause
- relative clause functions
Examples
-
A relative clause, like the one in the sentence, provides additional information about the noun it describes.
-
However, relative clauses were found to have the strongest age-related growth.
Academic text (2014) -
The grammar of the relative clause is garbled; it needed to be rephrased.
Blog text (19) -
In addition, children's use of relative clauses had a notable loading onto Factor 4.
Academic text (2014) -
Examination of children's relative clause use thus affords an additional opportunity to describe children's lexical skills.
Academic text (2014) -
Dependent clauses are predominantly relative clauses (66%) functioning as adjectives.
Academic text (2002) -
The remaining third of the target sentences included a center-embedded, object-relative clause (e.g., the dean that the professor criticized was sheepish).
Academic text (2011) -
One third of the sentences included a center-embedded, subject-relative clause (e.g., The submarine that bumped the yacht was reckless).
Academic text (2011) -
In this case, it is connected grammatically with the rest of the stanza because it embodies two crucial relative clauses that qualify "sykes" ("sighs").
Academic text (2003) -
In the sentence 'The book that I borrowed from you is fantastic', 'that I borrowed from you' is a relative clause modifying 'the book'.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The term is directly compositional: 'relative' (relating or referring) modifies 'clause' (a unit of sentence), so a learner who knows both words can infer it is a clause that relates to or modifies something (i.e., a noun). Although somewhat technical, this construction parallels equivalent phrases in many languages, so a B1 learner familiar with the constituent meanings will likely grasp the intended grammatical sense.
Etymology
Relative clause comes from the idea of a small group of words called a clause that is 'related' to a noun and gives more information about it. Think of it as a note attached to a person's name that explains who they are, so the term now means a clause that 'adds information' about a noun.