Learning English

"The place where Handel AND Hendrix lived!"

In this session, we are taking a close look at relative clauses – these add information about people, places, and things to sentences and they are useful when explaining or defining something.

Look at the following examples:

• This is the house where Virginia Woolf lived.
• Handel was a German composer who lived in London in the 18^th Century.
• The guitar which/that Jimi Hendrix used for most of his performances was a Fender Stratocaster.

As you can see, we use where, who, which, and that with relative clauses – but when do we use these words? Watch the Blue Plaque video from Session 1 again and listen carefully for these words. Can you figure out when they are used?

Read the text and try the activity

The answer is simple – we use where to add information about a place (a country, city, building, or other space); we use who to give details about a person; and we use which to begin a relative clause about an item, an idea, or a thing. That can sometimes be used in place of which, and it can also sometimes be used in place of who. Look at the following examples:

• The demonstration which/that Logie Baird gave in 1926 was the first time the world watched TV!
• Florence Nightingale is someone who/that I really admire.

We can’t use that in place of where, however.

• University College of London has a blue plaque to show where Charles Darwin used to live.

In informal speech, the pronoun that can replace who, which and where.

• Jennifer is the woman that I love.
• The library is the place that I feel the most relaxed.

In all of these examples, the relative clause adds some important information about the person, place or thing mentioned in the sentence. These clauses can be used to explain, define, or emphasise something or to give specific information about it.

For example, if someone hasn’t heard of Handel, we could tell them: “He was a famous composer who lived 300 years ago.”

When we say: “This is the house where Virginia Woolf lived” we are describing what is special about this house and what makes it different from the many other houses in the street.

We can also use relative clauses for emphasis. We could simply say: “Handel was born in Germany but he lived in London” but we can highlight this contrast by saying: “Handel was born in Germany but London is the city where he lived.”

Of course, we may already know who Jimi Hendrix is and we definitely know what a guitar is but we can say: “The guitar which/that Jimi Hendrix used for most of his performances was a Fender Stratocaster” to give information about a specific guitar.

We have looked at quite a few examples so far. What have you noticed about the position of the relative clauses? Do they come at the end of a sentence, in the middle of a sentence, or in both positions?

Relative clauses can be used in the middle or at the end of a sentence. The important thing is that the relative clause will usually come directly after the person, place, or thing it describes.

So, we if we want to give some information about Florence Nightingale, we can explain:

• She was the woman who set up the nursing school at St. Thomas’s Hospital.

But, if we want to focus on the hospital, we can structure the sentence as follows:

• She worked at St. Thomas’s hospital, where she set up a special nursing school.

To do

We hope that explanation has helped you start to understand relative clauses! Test what you have learned so far with our next activity.

Next

Have you finished the quiz? Well done! That was our introduction to relative clauses but there is still more to learn! Continue to Activity 2 to focus on where and which.