Definition:
A clause that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase and is usually introduced by a relative pronoun (which, that, who, whom, whose). Also known as an adjective clause.
Examples and Observations:
- "It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages."
(Henry Ford) - "Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal."
(Charles Darwin) - "I like to keep a bottle of stimulant handy in case I see a snake, which I also keep handy."
(W. C. Fields) - "Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal."
(Martin Luther King, Jr.) - "The essence of childhood, of course, is play, which my friends and I did endlessly on streets / that we reluctantly shared with traffic."
(Bill Cosby) - "Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it."
(George Orwell) - "Relative clauses are so called because they are related by their form to an antecedent. They contain within their structure an anaphoric element whose interpretation is determined by the antecedent. This anaphoric element may be overt or covert. In the overt case the relative clause is marked by the presence of one of the relative words who, whom, whose, which, etc., as or within the initial constituent: clauses of this type we call wh relatives. In non-wh relatives the anaphoric element is covert, a gap; this class is then subdivided into that relatives and bare relatives depending on the presence or absence of that."
(Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Cambridge University Press, 2002) - "There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come."
(Victor Hugo)
Also Known As: relative construction, adjective clause, adjectival clause
