Today we’ll be talking about restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses. I already wrote about this distinction in my article Relative Pronouns in English – Introduction. You may also be interested in my other article on relative pronouns, Substituting Relative Pronouns.
Anyway, what are restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses? Let’s start with the former.
Restrictive Relative Clauses
Restrictive relative clauses are also known as defining relative clauses. This is because they define the subject or object, by which I mean they carry essential information about the subject or object without which the main clause would be incomplete, would have a different meaning or wouldn’t make sense at all. We can all the relative pronouns that we talked about in the preceding articles in restrictive relative clauses, so WHICH, THAT, WHO, WHOM and WHOSE. As far as things are concerned, THAT is preferable, but both WHICH and THAT are commonly used. We usually don’t separate the restrictive relative clause from the main clause by a comma.
And now let’s have a look at some examples of sentences with restrictive relative clauses and let’s try to remove the clauses to see what remains. So, here’s the first sentence:
I like people who smile a lot.
I like people.
Grammatically both sentences are correct, but the meaning of the second sentence is much more general than the first one’s. It means that I like people in general. In the first sentence there’s the restriction as to what kind of people I like This is why we call it restrictive clauses.
Here’s another example:
I eat only vegetables that I grow myself.
I eat only vegetables.
Again, grammatically both sentences are fine, but they have totally different meanings. The second one implies that the only thing I eat are vegetables.
Here are some more pairs like this:
She’s looking for a woman whose maiden name was Hammond.
She’s looking for a woman.
Here the restrictive clause gives us some context. The second sentence is too general or even ambiguous.
Here’s the house which I bought.
Here’s the house.
The relative clause in the first sentence specifies which house exactly I mean.
The men whom the witch turned into frogs started croaking.
The men started croaking.
In this example, if we remove the relative clause, the sentence either makes no sense or can be understood in a different way. The verb to croak also means to speak in a rough, low voice that is hard to understand, which is not exactly what we meant when talking about the frogs.
So, as you can see, restrictive relative clauses are essential for the full understanding of what we are being told. What about non-restrictive clauses?
Non-Restrictive Relative Clauses
Non-restrictive relative clauses are used for additional, non-essential information about the subject or object. Even if we leave the out, we still know what or who we are talking about. Non-restrictive relative clauses are usually separated by commas. We can use all the same relative pronouns as with restrictive clauses, except THAT. Have a look at this example:
His youngest daughter, whom we also invited to the party, likes Italian food.
If we remove the relative clause, we’ll be left with the following:
His youngest daughter likes Italian food.
So, we still know exactly who we are talking about. The information contained in the relative clause didn’t define the subject at all, it just added some additional facts.
Here’s another example:
We dressed up as frogs, which was a good decision.
We dressed up as frogs.
The relative clause in the first sentence doesn’t tell us anything more about the frogs than what we would know from the second sentence without the relative clause.
Here’s an example with WHO:
His wife, who loves pizza, is a very nice person.
His wife is a very nice person.
Here the relative clause also gives us some extra information about his wife. But even without this information we still know who we are talking about because normally one has just one wife, but in some cultures one can have more. Then we could use a restrictive relative clause to tell the wives apart. Have a look:
His wife who loves pizza is a very nice person.
Here we’re talking about one of his wives, the one who loves pizza, as opposed to the other ones who don’t. This particular wife is nice, maybe the others aren’t.
Finally, an example with WHOSE:
The old house opposite the bank, whose roof is being repaired, will be sold at auction.
The old house opposite the bank will be sold at auction.
Again, even this additional information about its roof, we still know exactly which house we’re talking about.
As you can see, restrictive and non-restrictive clauses may look very similar or even identical (except for the commas in writing), as you could see in the example with the pizza above, so it’s crucial to remember to put the commas where necessary or you can end up saying something you didn’t intend to say.
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