When relative clauses show up in reading, the comma clues will be very helpful to English learners, but they must be taught to recognize the role that punctuation plays in providing the clue. In oral skills work, students must be taught to both use and recognize brief pauses that surround the nonrestrictive relative clauses. Most difficult is teaching the use of commas in writing, since this is when students must clearly know the difference and be able to convey the information in their minds to their readers.
Activity 16.9: Restrictive v. Nonrestrictive Relative Clauses 2
Exercise A – Put an asterisk in front of the ungrammatical sentences below.
1. The Mississippi River, which is the biggest river in America, begins in Minnesota.
2. The Mississippi River, that is the biggest river in America, begins in Minnesota.
3. I have visited Itasca State Park, which marks the beginning of the Mississippi River.
4. I have visited Itasca State Park, that marks the beginning of the Mississippi River.
5. Alice, who studied hard, earned a good grade.
6. Alice, that studied hard, earned a good grade.
7. I picked the beans, which were mature.
8. I picked the beans, that were mature.
9. Cheetahs, which can run 70 miles per hour, are built for speed.
10. Cheetahs, that can run 70 miles per hour, are built for speed.
11. The girls, who studied hard, got good grades.
12. The girls, that studied hard, got good grades.
Exercise B – Try to write out the rule that the ungrammatical sentences above violate.
Activity 16.9 shows that there are further differences in form between restrictive and nonrestrictive relative clauses than simply the use of commas. There are different rules governing the selection of the relative pronouns that can be used, too. Specifically, we see that the alternative choices we learned earlier aren’t available for use in nonrestrictive clauses; we can only use them in restrictive relative clauses. We can not use the pronoun that in a nonrestrictive clause, nor can we deleted an object relative pronoun in a nonrestrictive clause.
That is, it is grammatical to say all three of the following sentences because they all use a restrictive clause:
1) The girl whom I tutored passed the test.
2) The girl that I tutored passed the test.
3) The girl I tutored passed the test.
However, of the following examples only the first is ungrammatical because they are nonrestrictive clauses, and the alternative pronouns choices of that and deletion, aren’t grammatical.
1) Abby, whom I tutored, passed the test.
2) *Abby, that I tutored, passed the test
3) *Abby, I tutored, passed the test.
Grammar Muscle Heads may have thought of the prescriptive rule saying, “Don’t use that for people, use who or whom.”
If we look at the ungrammatical example about Abby above, we might think that this rule is a good one, but then when we look at the second example in the first group, we see that it is a poor rule for teachers to pass on to their students. It is perfectly fine, in both the grammatical and standard senses, to use either whom or that at the beginning of the relative clause in the sentence the girl that I tutored passed the test. It is NOT fine, however, to use that in the sentence Abby, whom I tutored, passed the test.
The key to the usage is not whether the referent of the relative pronoun is a human or not, but whether the relative clause is restrictive or not.
If we really want to go deep diving into the issue of using who, whom, or that, we can actually raise the question of whether we should call that a pronoun or not. After all, when we considered the use of the demonstrative determiner that as a demonstrative pronoun, we saw that it might best be viewed as a case of gapping or deletion of the head noun. Could something similar be happening here, too?
It is possible that the answer is yes. If we look back to noun clauses, we see the word that showing up as a subordinating conjunction. What if the word that is actually a subordinating conjunction for relative clauses, too, and the real relative pronouns are who, whom, whose, and which?
If this is true, we could view the two sentences, The girl passed the test, and I tutored the girl as the deep structure. The first transformation rule would be “Combine the two clauses with the subordinating conjunction that”: The girl that I tutored her passed the test. If you listen to native speakers talk, they will, in fact, sometimes produce sentences like this.
The second transformation would be “Insert a relative pronoun for the personal pronoun and shift it to the beginning of the subordinate clause”: The girl that whom I tutored passed the test. Sentences like these aren’t produced by NSEs, however.
The final transformation would be “Delete either the relative pronoun or the subordinating conjunction”: The girl whom I tutored (deleting that) passed the test, or The girl that I tutored (deleting whom) passed the test, or even The girl I tutored passed the test (deleting both). All of these sentences are produced by native speakers and accepted as normal, and even accepted in formal discourse.
Before claims of such a step-wise transformation process can be made with any certainty, though, more research needs to be done. And we certainly won’t worry about presenting any of this to NNSEs. This is a theoretical concern and is not worthy of time in pedagogical grammar.
