A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

184 Chapter 11 Relative clauses

For the relative clause in [Ii] we thus have "R were absent from the meeting".

R has members as antecedent, so we understand that some members were absent

from the meeting, and it is to all of these that the secretary wrote.

For [ii] we similarly have "I needed R". The antecedent isfilm, so I needed some

film and this film is unobtainable.

The way this feature distinguishes relative clauses from content clauses is illustrated
in [2]:

[2] RELATIVE CLAUSE

II CONTENT CLAUSE

They rejected the suggestion which your son made.

They rejected the suggestion that your son was lying.

For [i] we have "your son made R", with suggestion as the antecedent: we under­

stand that your son made some suggestion, and they rejected it.

In [ii], however, there is no such R element in the subordinate clause. The clause

does not contain any anaphoric link to the head noun suggestion: it merely gives

the content of the suggestion. I

Wh and non-wh relative clauses

Although it is an essential feature of the modifying relative clause that it contain an
anaphoric link to the head noun, there doesn't have to be an overt pronoun to
express that link, as there has been in each of the examples so far.
The relative clauses that do contain an overt anaphoric link like who or which are
called wh relatives. There are others that don't, and they are the non-wh relatives.
They come in two sUbtypes: one kind that is introduced by the clause subordinator
that (which also occurs in declarative content clauses such as [2ii]) and another kind
that doesn't. So we have this picture so far:

[3] WH RELATIVE:

11

iii NON-WH:

{THAT RELATIVE

BARE RELATIVE

The film which I needed is not obtainable.

The film that I needed is not obtainable.

The film I needed is not obtainable.

The non-wh relatives with the subordinator, as in [ii], are called that relatives.
Those where the subordinator is omitted, as in [iii], are called bare relatives.
There is no relative pronoun in [ii] or [iii], but there is still an anaphoric relation to
the head nounfilm; these, no less than [i], can be represented as "I needed R", with
R functioning as object and interpreted as some film. The idea that needed in [ii-iii]
has a covert object is evident from a very simple fact: although need is transitive, and
has to have an object in canonical clauses, here we cannot add an overt object for it:

[^4 ] *Thefilm that I needed more time was not obtainable.

J There is also an important functional distinction between the two constructions. The content clause is

a complement and is licensed by only a small proportion of nouns: we could not, for example, replace

the relative clauses in [I) by content clauses. The relative clause is a modifier and hence not subject

to such licensing restrictions.