Delahunty and Garvey
c. *Mr. Pferdfeld, we have just met,...
Moreover, restrictive relative clauses may be moved away from the nouns
they modify, but non-restrictives may not:
(38) a. A man who was from Iceland came in.
b. A man came in who was from Iceland.
(39) a. Bill, who was from Iceland, came in.
b. *Bill came in, who was from Iceland.We should also mention here, that other modifiers in NPs can be restrictive
or non-restrictive, such as PPs.
(40) a. Dell computers with touch-screen capability...
b. Dell computers, with touch-screen capability,...So far we have described only full finite relative clauses. However, we also
find reduced relative clauses:
(41) The man standing near the entrance is my father.(41) can be interpreted as an elliptical version of (42):
(42) The man who is standing near the entrance is my father.Reduction of this sort is common when the implied material is a wh-word
and an inflected form of be, which as we saw before, is referred to as whiz-
deletion.
Reduced relatives may also function as non-restrictive modifiers:
(43) a. Astrid, standing near the entrance, was almost trampled in the rush.
b. Astrid, who was standing near the entrance,...
Exercise
- Using (a) as a model, for each sentence below: (1) identify the rela-
tive clause; (2) determine whether a wh-word, that, or zero introduces
the clause; (3) identify the expression modified by the clause; (4) lo-
cate the gap in the clause; (5) “normalize” the clause by expressing it
as an independent sentence as in (28); and (6) identify the grammatical