Welcome to the ASA blog! Today we take a look at relative pronouns, which are often difficult for English learners (who sometimes find them tricky)!

First, what is a pronoun? Pronouns take the place of nouns (there’s a convenient hint in the word ‘pronoun,’ which includes the word ‘noun!’). Nouns of course are people, places, things, or ideas. They often form all or part of the grammatical subject of a sentence. For various reasons, nouns themselves aren’t always used, especially after one has been introduced in a sentence or paragraph. In these cases we use a pronoun instead. The noun replaced by the pronoun is called the antecedent. For example, here:

“A car is driving down the street. It’s black,” it means “the car¹.”

Here:

“My mother is 70 years old. She is very nice,” she means “my mother.”

There are several different types of pronouns, and we will explore them all in future blog entries. Most people are more familiar with personal pronouns, such as he/him, she/her, we/us, I/me, they/them, and you/you², but today we’re looking at those pronouns called relative pronouns.

Relative pronouns include³ who, whom, whoever, whomever, whose, which, whichever, what, whatever, when, whenever, where, wherever, why, and that, but by far the most common relative pronouns are who, whom, whose, which, and that, and these are the pronouns we’ll be focusing on today.

Relative pronouns are often used to connect two sentences into a single sentence composed of two clauses, often separated by a comma (,). The second clause, starting with the relative pronoun, is called a relative clause, and together with the main clause makes up the new joined sentence.

Very often relative pronouns are used in relative clauses instead of the personal pronoun it, or demonstrative pronouns like this and these when referring to things, and in place of personal pronouns like he and she when referring to people, in the second sentence (where there are two sentences). If we return to the examples above, where the second sentence uses it, we can join the two sentences into one using which, like this:

“A car is driving down the street. It’s black.” → “A car, which is black, is driving down the street.’

Which is black is the relative clause, and which is the relative pronoun. The main clause, A car is driving down the street, is here divided into two parts: A car and is driving down the street.

(It’s also possible to say “The car which is driving down the street is black,” with a slight change in emphasis).

We do nearly the same thing when referring to people, but we use who or whom instead of he or him, etc., so:

“My mother is 70 years old. She is very nice.” → “My mother, who is 70 years old, is very nice.”

(We could also say “My mother, who is very nice, is 70 years old.” It depends on where we want to put the focus.)

So when referring to people we use who/whom (or that), and when referring to things we use which (or that).

We can also refer to an entire clause using which, at least in informal or spoken English, as in this example:

“The dog jumped on the bed. This annoyed the cat.” → “The dog jumped on the bed, which annoyed the cat.”

In this case which refers to “[The fact that] the dog jumped on the bed,” not just “the dog,” or “the bed” (which would refer to “the dog” if we said something like “The dog, which annoyed the cat, jumped on the bed.”; it would refer to “the bed” in the sentence “The dog jumped on the bed, which the cat was sleeping on.”).

If we are referring to a person in a relationship of grammatical possession with someone or something (someone who “owns” or “has” something or someone), we use whose. So for example, if we have a sentence like this:

“That man has a sister whom I spoke with yesterday.” (“a sister” is the antecedent.)

We could say “That is the man whose sister I spoke with yesterday.” (“The man”, who has a sister, is the antecedent.⁴) This has a very different meaning than “That is the man whom I spoke with yesterday.” In the second sentence I spoke with the man’s sister, not the man.

For things, we might change:

“That woman has a new sports car, which I saw this morning” (“a new sports car” is the antecedent) to

“That is the woman whose new sports car I saw this morning” (“The woman,” who owns a new sports car, is the antecedent).

Again, this would be different in meaning from “That is the woman whom I saw this morning.” In the second example above I saw a new sports car, not the woman.

Finally, a note on that. Some grammarians consider that to be a conjunction rather than a relative pronoun, but it is often used as and is widely thought to be a relative pronoun. That can be used for either people or things, but generally sounds slightly less formal when referring to people; when referring to things there are certain rules about how it can be used⁵, but more on that in a future blog entry.

Hope this helped! Please contact us if you have any questions or comments, or if you’d like to book a free appointment to see how we can help! Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next time with another mini-lesson in the ASA Blog!