Relative clauses are bound clauses that modify NPs and occasionally CPs. The former are adjoined to NPs. A relative clause contains a WH-phrase which moves and is adjoined to CP: The student who likes ...

The man who lives next door is very friendly. In the above sentence, the relative clause who lives next door modifies the noun ‘man’. It gives more information about the subject and is essential to ...

Modifying sentences containing relative clauses is no easy task! Because relative clauses play a central role in English discourse, modifying text can result in awkward or unnatural discourse. However ...

One of the major properties that distinguishes human language from other forms of animal communication such as a bee's dance or a crow's caw is recursion, or the ability to embed one sentence within ...

I got a great question from a reader named Bill in Florida. He asked about the following sentence, which I wrote in a recent column: “If I were to write that coffee smells good, I wouldn’t hear a word ...