Using relative pronouns as reference words

WE have already reviewed four reference word strategies, or the use of specific grammatical devices that allow us to clarify and enliven our spoken or written prose and to avoid unnecessarily repeating ourselves. Those strategies are the use of demonstrative reference words, the use of broader meaning and summary words, and the use of synonyms and related words. This time we will take up one last strategy: the use of relative pronouns to allow us to provide additional information about the nouns preceding them in the sentence. Relative pronouns, you will recall, serve to link dependent clauses or phrases to their antecedent nouns, doing so as intermediate subjects or objects of those dependent clauses.

It may come as a surprise, but we have already encountered most of those relative pronouns —"which," "who," "that," and "whose" and the compounds "whoever," "whomever," and "whichever" — in their more usual roles as subordinating conjunctions. Recall that they are better known as the subordinators, those word-markers that announce and link subordinate clauses or phrases to the main — and independent — clauses, resulting in complex sentences.

English Plain and Simple (2229th of a series)