47 Relative Clauses
Take the two sentences ‘You saw the man’ and ‘The man went.’ We can use the second sentence to modify the noun ‘man’ in the first by combining the two sentences: ‘You saw the man that went.’ Here, ‘that went’ is the relative clause.
The relative clause in ‘You saw the man that went’ modifies the noun ‘man.’ We call the noun that is modified the head of the relative clause.
It is possible to have both subjects and objects in the relative clause. For example, we can combine ‘You saw the man’ with ‘I saw the man’ to get ‘You saw the man that I saw.’ The relative clause in this sentence is ‘that I saw.’ The head is, again, the noun ‘man.’ Notice that the object of the sentence ‘I saw the man’ disappears when it combines with ‘You saw the man’ to become a relative clause.
For another example, combine ‘You saw the man’ with ‘The man saw me.’ This time you get ‘You saw the man that saw me.’ This time it is the subject of the relative clause that disappears.
Study these patterns:
Subject of an intransitive relative clause is head:
You saw the man that went.
head relative clause
Subject of a transitive relative clause is head:
You saw the man that saw me.
head relative clause
Object of relative clause is head:
You saw the man that I saw.
head relative clause
The basic relative clauses covered in this section are those that are introduced in English with a word like ‘that’ (as in the examples above and the models below) or ‘who’ (as in ‘the man who I saw’) or ‘which’ (as in ‘the canoe which I saw’). As it happens, SENĆOŦEN is somewhat similar to English in the way it forms these types of basic relative clauses. There are, however, other types of relative clauses in English, such as ‘the place where I live’ or ‘the reason why I left.’ The translations to these are formed very differently in SENĆOŦEN and are covered in §26.3 and §39.
A technical description and discussion of SENĆOŦEN relative clauses can be found in Montler 1993.