APPLYING KEY IDEASDirections: Analyze these sentences to check your understanding of the
concepts in the last few sections. You may want to draw tree diagrams to show
the grammatical relations.
- Buggsy’s goons had come from New Jersey.
- Fritz realized that he could have forgotten the meeting.
- Macarena liked Fritz, even though she hated his apartment.
- That Buggsy flirted with Macarena and Rita de Luna shocked the host of the
party. - Buggsy’s goons got nice tans after they arrived in L.A. from the East Coast.
- Macarena sometimes wondered whether she should settle down.
- When she thought of her childhood in cold Chicago, Mrs. DiMarco was
happy that she lived in L.A. - Mrs. DiMarco’s nephew had lost his way after his parents died.
- She knew that he ran with a dangerous crowd but was unsure that she could
help him. - Although Fritz had had little success with women, he thought that he was a
ladykiller. - The fact that he was obnoxious troubled everyone.
- He believed that he had bad luck.
- Macarena’s friends disliked Fritz immensely, and because they were her
friends, they suggested that she find a better beau.
14.Fred was more kind, but he brooded and often was downcast because he felt
unappreciated.
Relative Clauses
In many respects, relative clauses (RC) are among the more interesting struc-
tures in English, in part because of how they work as modifiers. They supply in-
formation to noun phrases, but they also can function as sentence-level
modifiers. When they do, they modify themeaningof the independent clause
rather than a syntactic component—a curious arrangement. Another factor that
makes relative clauses interesting is therelative pronoun(RP). We have seen
how other dependent clauses—subordinate clauses and complement
clauses—are connected to an independent clause via a linking word (a subordi-
nating conjunction and a complementizer, respectively). Relative clauses are
linked to independent clauses via a relative pronoun, but relative pronouns are
142 CHAPTER 4