How to convert sentences with relative clauses?
Answers
My last article for English Harmony was about when you can and can’t omit relative pronouns such as “who” and “that” from sentences. What we concluded is that you can omit the pronoun when it acts as an object, as in the sentence below:
The dog (that) Mary is petting has brown fur. (The relative pronoun “that” is optional here.)
But you cannot omit the pronoun when it acts as a subject, as in this sentence:
The dog that is eating a biscuit has brown fur.
However, astute reader Juhapekka pointed out that in examples like the above sentence, you can’t omit only the pronoun, but you can omit the pronoun plus the form of “to be” (in this case, “is”):
The dog eating a biscuit has brown fur. (This is a well-formed sentence!)
This introduces an entirely new topic in English grammar called clause-to-phrase reduction. This article will explore clause-to-phrase reduction, explain how and why it happens, and hopefully make the mysterious world of English grammar a little bit less confusing.