Delahunty and Garvey
Complements in NPs:
Certain classes of nouns take complements, which may be expressed as clauses:
(25) a. The idea that the Earth is only a few thousand years old has been
utterly disproved.
b. The claim that genetics determines character is intriguing.Note the overlap between nouns that take complement clauses and nouns
that can occur as the head of the subject of a sentence with a subject comple-
ment clause, e.g., idea. In fact, a NP with a complement clause can typically
be rephrased as a subject complement sentence with a clausal complement;
compare the subject of (25a) with The idea is that the Earth is only a few thou-
sand years old.
Exercise
Create five more sentences containing NPs that contain complement
clauses, like those in (25a,b). For each, provide evidence that your
noun complement clauses really are noun complement clauses.
Clauses that function as modifiers
We turn now to clauses that function as modifiers of various elements in
sentences. We begin with relative clauses (RCs), which occur in NPs and
modify their heads, for example, We all know the person whom/that you
spoke to. Later we will deal with clauses that modify Vs, VPs, and other
clauses, namely adverbial clauses.
Clauses that modify nouns (relative clauses)
Relative clauses (RCs) (also, but misleadingly, called adjective clauses), fol-
low the head nouns they modify and may begin either with that, a wh-word
such as who or which, a phrase with a wh-word in it, or no special word at
all. Relative clauses must be divided into two types, restrictive and non-re-
strictive (or appositive) relatives. In written English, appositive relatives are
separated from their head noun by a comma and end with another comma.
Restrictive relatives are not set off by commas. The presence or absence of
commas reflects a semantic difference between these two types, although
there are formal differences between them too, which we deal with below.
We begin by illustrating some of the variety of restrictive relatives.