PRACTICAL LANGUAGE AUTUMN 2022

Elements of grammar: Relative clauses

Identify the relative pronouns and relative clauses in the text below:

“Not for the first time an argument had broken out over breakfast at number four, Privet Drive.
Mr Vernon Dursley had been woken in the early hours of the morning by a loud, hooting noise
from his nephew Harry’s room.
‘Third time this week!’ he roared across the table. ‘If you can’t control that owl, it’ll have to
go!’
Harry tried, yet again, to explain.
‘She’s bored,’ he said. ‘She’s used to flying around outside. If I could just let her out at night…’
‘Do I look stupid?’ snarled Uncle Vernon, a bit of fried egg dangling from his bushy
moustache. ‘I know what’ll happen if that owl is let out.’
He exchanged dark looks with his wife, Petunia.
Harry tried to argue back but his words were drowned by a long, loud belch from the
Dursleys’ son, Dudley.
‘I want more bacon.’
‘There’s more in the frying pan, sweetums,’ said Aunt Petunia, turning misty eyes on her
massive son. ‘We must feed you up while we’ve got the chance… I don’t like the sound of that
school food…’
‘Nonsense, Petunia, I never went hungry when I was at Smeltings,’ said Uncle Vernon heartily.
‘Dudley gets enough, don’t you, son?’
Dudley, who was so large his bottom drooped over either side of the kitchen chair, grinned
and turned to Harry.
‘Pass the frying pan.’
‘You’ve forgotten the magic word,’ said Harry irritably.
The effect of this simple sentence on the rest of the family was incredible. Dudley gasped and
fell off his chair with a crash that shook the whole kitchen; Mrs Dudley gave a small scream
and clapped her hands to her mouth; Mr Dursley jumped to his feet, veins throbbing in his
temples.
‘I meant “please”!’ said Harry quickly. ‘I didn’t mean –’
‘WHAT HAVE I TOLD YOU,’ thundered his uncle, spraying spit over the table, ‘ABOUT
SAYING THE M WORD IN OUR HOUSE?’ […]
Harry stared from his purple-faced uncle to his pale aunt, who was trying to heave Dudley to
his feet.
‘All right,’ said Harry, ‘all right…’
Uncle Vernon sat back down, breathing like a winded rhinoceros and watching Harry closely
out of the corners of his small, sharp eyes.
Ever since Harry had come home for the summer holidays, Uncle Vernon had been treating
him like a bomb that might go off at any moment, because Harry wasn’t a normal boy. As a
matter of fact, he was as not normal as it is possible to be.
Harry Potter was a wizard – a wizard fresh from his first year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft
and Wizardry. And if the Dursleys were unhappy to have him back for the holidays, it was
nothing to how Harry felt. […]
The Dursleys were what wizards called Muggles (not a drop of magical blood in their veins)
and as far as they were concerned, having a wizard in the family was a matter of deepest
shame. . .
Harry looked nothing like the rest of the family. Uncle Vernon was large and neckless, with
an enormous black moustache; Aunt Petunia was horse-faced and bony; Dudley was blond,
pink and porky. Harry, on the other hand, was small and skinny, with brilliant green eyes and
jet-black hair that was always untidy. He wore round glasses, and on his forehead was a thin,
lightning-shaped scar.
[…] This scar was the only hint of Harry’s very mysterious past, of the reason he had been left
on the Dursleys’ doorstep eleven years before.
At the age of one, Harry had somehow survived a curse from the greatest dark sorcerer of all
time, Lord Voldemort, whose name most witches and wizards still feared to speak. Harry’s
parents had died in Voldemort’s attack, but Harry had escaped with his lightning scar, and
somehow – nobody understood why – Voldemort’s powers had been destroyed the instant he
had failed to kill Harry.
So Harry had been brought up by his dead mother’s sister and her husband. He had spent ten
years with the Dursleys, never understanding why he kept making odd things happen without
meaning to, believing the Dursleys’ story that he had got his scar in the car crash which had
killed his parents.
And then, exactly a year ago, Hogwarts had written to Harry, and the whole story had come
out. Harry had taken up his place at wizard school, where he and his scar were famous… but
now the school year was over, and he was back with the Dursleys for the summer, back to
being treated like a dog that had rolled in something smelly.
The Dursleys hadn’t even remembered that today happened to be Harry’s twelfth birthday.
Of course, his hopes hadn’t been high; they’d never given him a proper present, let alone a
cake – but to ignore it completely…
At that moment, Uncle Vernon cleared his throat importantly, and said, ‘Now, as we all know,
today is a very important day.’
Harry looked up, hardly daring to believe it.
‘This could well be the day I make the biggest deal of my career,’ said Uncle Vernon.
Harry went back to his toast.”

(J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Bloomsbury, 2000, pp.7-11)

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Read the examples below. The asterisk (*) means that the sentence is incorrect.

DEFINING AND NON-DEFINING RELATIVE CLAUSES 3rd and 4th are non defining
clauses
(1) There are several matters that / which we need to discuss.
(2) The book that / which I ordered has not arrived yet.
(3) I work at the Revenue and Customs Office, which is just over the road.
(4) Paris, which I've visited several times, is my favourite city.
(5) *She sold her car, that she had bought the year before. (ungrammatical)
(6) This is the student who / that won last year’s creative writing competition.
(7) Anna, who won last year’s creative writing competition, has applied for the scholarship.
(8) *Anna, that won last year’s creative writing competition, has applied for the scholarship.
(ungrammatical)
A defining clauses provides key
information, whereas the non-defining
What is the difference between a defining and a non-defining relative clause?
gives us additional information
Which relative pronoun cannot be used in a non-defining relative clause?
That

LEAVING OUT THE RELATIVE PRONOUN

(9) There are several matters that / which / Ø we need to discuss. Which/that in number 9 is the object
(10) This is the equipment that / which gave us a lot of problems. Which/that in number 10 is the subject
so we cannot omit it

When can a relative pronoun be omitted / left out?

REFERRING TO PEOPLE: WHO, WHOM / THAT

Separate relative pronoun
(11) There were several people whom I did not recognize. (rather formal) from the preposition
(12) She was exactly the person who / that / Ø we wanted for the job.
(13) They were asked to describe a person to whom they had spoken earlier. (rather formal)
(14) They were asked to describe a person whom they had spoken to earlier. (less formal)
(15) They were asked to describe a person who they had spoken to earlier. (neutral / informal)
(16) They got asked to describe someone Ø they had spoken to earlier. (informal)

EXPRESSING POSSESSION: WHOSE

(17) The police want to interview anyone whose car has been vandalized recently.
(18) One of the cars, whose wheels had been removed, had to be taken to a garage.

RELATIVE PRONOUNS AND PREPOSITIONS

(19) It is a subject about which Professor James knows a great deal.
(20) *It is a subject about that Professor James knows a great deal. (ungrammatical)
(21) The goods, for which we had already paid, had to be returned to the factory. (rather
formal)
(22) The goods, which we had already paid for, had to be returned to the factory.
(23) The professor with whom I attended the conference offered me a research post. (rather
formal)

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(24) The professor I attended the conference with offered me a research post.
(25) All the extra responsibilities which she has taken on are proving to be a worry. (phrasal
verb)
(26) *All the extra responsibilities on which she has taken are proving to be a worry.
(ungrammatical)

Place in the Defining Non-defining Nature of the

Register
relative clause relative clause relative clause antecedent
who who all
subject people
that informal/neutral
whom whom formal
who who formal/neutral
object people
that neutral
Ø [no
informal
pronoun]
that all
subject things
which which all
which which all
object that things all
Ø informal/neutral
genitive
whose whose people / things all
(possessive)

PRACTICE
Identify the relative pronouns in the following extracts from Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are
You Going Through (2020):

1. “I had come to visit this friend, this very dear old friend whom I had not seen in several

years, and whom, given the gravity of her illness, I might not see again.”

2. “Between our failure to control the spread of WMDs and our failure to keep from power

those for whom their use was not only thinkable but perhaps even an irresistible

temptation, apocalyptic war was becoming increasingly likely…”

3. “He had an iPad on the lectern in front of him, to which his gaze fell from time to time,

but instead of reading straight from the text he spoke as though he’d memorized every

line.”

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4. “As in the article I’d read and on which the talk was based, he supported his statements

with numerous references.”

5. “And who could believe that the concentration of such vast power in the hands of a few

tech corporations – not to mention the system for mass surveillance on which their

dominance and profits depended – could be in the humanity’s future best interests.”

6. “A person who only read the man’s words, rather than hearing and watching him speak,

would probably have imagined him quite different from the way he actually was that

night.”

7. “Have you ever been at a Q&A where at least one person did not make some thoughtless

remark or ask the kind of irrelevant question that suggested that they hadn’t been

listening to a thing the speaker just said?”

8. “Before the applause, before the end of the talk, the man brought up something that did

in fact cause a ripple on that smooth surface. A murmur passed through the audience

(which the man ignored), people shifted in their seats, and I noticed a few headshakes,

and, from a row somewhere behind me, a woman’s nervous laugh.”

9. “And how sad, he said, to see so many among the most creative and best-educated

classes, those from whom we might have hoped for inventive solutions, instead

embracing personal therapies and pseudo-religious practices that promoted

detachment, a focus on the moment, acceptance of one’s surroundings as they were,

equanimity in the face of worldly cares.”

10. “I quickened my pace, leaving the crowd behind, but walking almost in step with me

was a man I recognized from the audience.”

11. “We talked about other people we knew in common, others we’d first met at the journal,

the ones with whom we were still friends, the ones with whom we’d lost touch.”

12. “She was the kind of person others describe as a fighter, a survivor, and it was because

of this that we who knew her were surprised when she announced that she intended to

forgo treatment.”

13. “I asked if she’d read the article on which the talk was based and she said that she had.”

14. “In the published story, which was written by the young (well, no longer young) lover,

characters’ genders and other details have been changed so that the student with whom

the professor ends up having an affair turns out to be a daughter about whose existence

he’d never been told.”

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15. “Each supplicant seems to be crying out for love – a love they’ve never found or a love

they fear they’re on the verge of losing.”

16. “Just as my friend had yet to meet the man her daughter was living with, her daughter

had no idea that her mother had also been seeing someone (a man whose interest cooled,

however, once it was clear that she might be seriously ill.”