Grammatical Summary

Confusion with Other Sentence Structures

Other Function of that

A problem with identifying English relative clauses is that the same words that serve as relative clause introducers have other functions. The word that is used as a “demonstrative pronoun” as in that book or I find that interesting. The word that is also used to introduce “that-clauses” (sometimes called “noun clauses”) as in the sentence below.

Wh-Words/Phrases in Other Embedded Structures

In addition to introducing relative clauses, wh-words and phrases are used to introduce various kinds of embedded sentence structures as in the following sentences:

Unlike relative clauses, that-clauses and these embedded wh-clauses occur in positions that regular noun phrase objects can occur in. Compare the above three sentences with the following three sentences:

A relative clause, on the other hand, occurs inside a noun phrase and modifies the noun that it immediately follows.

Of course, another function of wh-words and phrases is that they are used in “wh-questions” as in the following examples: