A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

188 Chapter 11 Relative clauses

apply to all politicians, but just the ones who make extravagant promises. The

information given in the relative clause is an integral part of the larger message:

it plays an essential role in defining who is being said to lack public trust.

In [ii], by contrast, the property of not being trusted applies to politicians in gen­

eral, not to a subset of them. Instead of picking out a subset of politicans it makes

the claim that none of them are trusted. But it also adds an extra assertion about

politicians in general, namely that they make extravagant promises.

On the basis of this kind of contrast, the two types of relative clause are traditionally
called 'restrictive' (or sometimes 'defining') and 'non-restrictive' (or 'non-defin­
ing'), respectively. We don't use these terms. They are misleading: the integrated
relative is NOT always restrictive, in the sense of picking out a subset of the set
denoted by the head noun. Take these examples:

[11] i Martha has [two sons who are still at school] and [two who are at university).
ii Martha has [two sons she can rely on] and hence is not unduly worried.

In [i] the relative clauses certainly are semantically restrictive: they distinguish

two sets of sons (evidently Martha has at least four in all).

In [ii], however, there is no restriction. There is no implication that Martha has

more than two sons. The information given in the relative clause does NOT dis­

tinguish these two sons from any other sons that she might have. Nevertheless, it

is presented as an integral part of the larger message. A natural reason for pre­

senting it as such is that it is essential to explaining WHY she was not unduly

worried. (Having two sons doesn't necessarily keep a mother from worrying; but

being able to rely on them does.)

Here's another example, one that we found in a novel by Dick Francis, where the NP
is definite rather than indefinite:

[12] [The fa ther who had planned my life to the point ormy unsought arrival in
Brighton] took it fo r granted that in the last three weeks of his legal
guardianship I would still act as he directed.

Again the relative clause does not distinguish one father from another: the narrator
here is talking about the only father he ever had. So the information given in the rel­
ative clause is NOT semantically restrictive. It is integrated, though. The reason for
expressing it in an integrated relative is that it has crucial relevance to the rest of the
message: it was because the father had planned the narrator's life hitherto that he
assumed he would be able to continue to do so.

(c) Syntax

In addition to what we have just set out concerning the phonological (or punctua­
tional) and semantic facts about integrated and supplementary relatives, there are
also a number of syntactic differences. We will mention four. 3

3 We ignore in this chapter a special subtype of integrated relative found in what is called the 'cleft'
construction, as in It was Kim who found the key; this construction is discussed in Ch. IS, §5.