Chapter 7 - Complementiser Phrasesa relative pronoun is somewhat stigmatised, being seen as a characteristic of
‘uneducated’ speech. Dialects and sociolects that make use of ‘what relatives’ also do
not use the relative pronoun in a way consistent with the interrogative pronoun. While
what as an interrogative pronoun has a ‘non-human’ aspect to it in any dialect, in that
you couldn’t point to a person and ask “what is that” without being offensive (“who is
that” would obviously be more appropriate), what-relatives are often used to modify
nouns with human referents:
(82) a a man [what I know]
b this bloke [what I was telling you about]
In standard English, however, what-relatives are not accepted even for modifying
nouns with non-human referents:
(83) a the book [what I read]
b an idea [what I had]
The only acceptable use of a what-relatives in standard English is in relatives which
appear to lack a modified noun, what are sometimes called headless relatives:
(84) a [what you should do now] is ...
b [what I say and what I do] are two totally different things
c [what I don’t understand] is ...
To conclude on this issue, what as an interrogative pronoun and what as a relative
pronoun are used in very different ways in all dialects.
There is another interesting difference between the use of interrogative and relative
pronouns which shows that there is a possibility available for a relative pronoun that is
not generally available with interrogatives. The restrictive relative is often noted to
come in three different forms. One starts with a wh-relative pronoun and is called a
wh-relative. Another starts with the complementiser that and is called a that-relative,
and the third has nothing in front of the subject and is called a zero relative. These are
exemplified below:
(85) a the man [who I paid]
b the man [that I paid]
c the man [I paid]
The wh-relative resembles an interrogative in more than just the fact that it is
introduced by a wh-element, but also in the process which apparently forms the two
structures. In both cases, the wh-element starts off inside the clause and moves to the
specifier of CP. Thus, both types of clauses start with a wh-element and have a
corresponding ‘gap’ in the position it was moved from. The gap contains the trace of
the moved wh-element:
(86) a I wonder [who 1 Sherlock suspects t 1 ]
b the butler [who 1 Sherlock suspects t 1 ]
Interestingly, although they do not start with a wh-element, both that-relatives and
zero relatives contain a gap in the same place that they would if they did have a wh-
element: