Relative clauses
Relative clauses can be tricky, as the following two questions need to be answered:
- What relative pronoun should be used: that, which, who, whom, or whose?
- Should a comma be inserted before and/or after the clause?
Making the right choice is crucially important, because it affects the meaning of what you write
Restrictive and non-restrictive clauses
Restrictive relative clauses identify the antecedent and narrow down the meaning. No commas are used.
People Things who / that that / which
the images that I will be discussing here (=only those images)
the economic imperatives which underpinned the negotiations
Among mothers who received welfare payments.
In informal style, an object pronoun can be omitted, but this is not common in formal writing.
His account illustrates the consequence a regime change might bring about. (= more informal)
Non-restrictive relative clauses provide additional information about the antecedent: the relative clause is not necessary to know what we are talking about. A non-restrictive clause is always enclosed in commas.
People Things who which (not that!)
Reliability, which typically ranges from zero to one, is the proportion of ...
This point was made by Kirby (1970), who suggested that ...
One particular type of non-restrictive clause refers to a whole clause rather than to one antecedent. In such cases, use which (not what).
Standards are improving, which is perhaps not surprising.
Who,whom and whose
- Bear in mind that who can only be used to refer to people; in all other cases, use that or which.
- if the pronoun is not the subject but the object of a verb or preposition, whom is the preferred form, although who is also used.
... a member of the staff with whom I worked ...
... US offficials whom he mistakenly identified as ...
- the possessive form is whose.
... learners whose knowledge is very superficial ...
... factors whose impact may be cyclical...
While it is sometimes claimed that whose can only be used to refer to people, inanimate antecedents are common. If you wish to avoid whose in such cases, however, use of which.
Participants were given a task the purpose of which was to identify ...
Prepositions
There are often prepositions in relative clauses. In formal English, the preposition is placed before, rather than after the relative clause.
the price at which their goods could be sold
writers about whom we were ambivalent
informal: writers we are ambivalent about
Note that the following pattern is very common in academic English.
a group of 59 staff, all of whom received the training
describes the ways in which objects are depicted
different levels of analysis, some of which are governed by ...