clauses. Before we start discussing relative clauses,

let's do a quick review by answering these four questions.

The first type of relative clause we'll be discussing is the subject relative

clause.

Let's take a look at these two sentences here.

"SMC is the community college."

"It is located close to UCLA". So, we have two independent clauses "SMC is a

community college" and a second independent clause

"It is located close to UCLA". What you need to focus your attention on is "the

community college" which is in bold and "it".

"It" is a pronoun that refers to "the community college". When we create a

subject relative clause,

we combine these two independent clauses ,and we have "SMC is a community college

that is located close to UCLA".

So, this relative clause describes the community college.

Here's another quick example. "Students are very intelligent." "They attend SMC." So,

we have "students" as the subject in the first sentence, and "they" as a subject

pronoun in the second sentence. When we combine them,

we have the sentence, "Students who attend SMC are very intelligent."

So, the relative clause describes the students. When we write relative clauses

or subject relative clauses we use the relative pronouns "who", "which", and "that"

to connect the two clauses. We use "who" for people, "which" for things,

animals, places, and ideas, and "that" we also use for people and things,

animals, places and ideas.

So, let's take a look at a couple of practice problems. Here again we have two

sentences.

"The students are hardworking." "They are learning English."

Now we want the first sentence to be the independent clause, and we want the

second sentence to become the relative clause, the clause that describes some

noun in the first sentence.

So, we have "the students" is the subject in the first sentence, and "they" is the

subject pronoun in the second sentence.

So, what we're going to do to combine these two sentences is we're going to

move this whole second clause right after the noun we're going to describe

which is "students".

So, if you see we have "The students they are learning English are hard working",

but we can't have two subjects in a row

so we replace the pronoun or the subject of the second sentence with a

relative pronoun and we get "The students" remember these are people so "WHO are

learning English are hardworking." Let's look at a second example. "The grammar

book belongs to the instructor."

"It is on the desk." So, which subject in the first sentence is the same as the

subject in the second sentence? We look here, and we have "the grammar book", that's

the subject of the first sentence, "belongs to the instructor."

"It is on the desk." So, "It" refers to "the grammar book".

We're going to combine the sentences again and we get "The grammar book which

is on the desk belongs to the instructor." So, this whole second clause

became the relative clause, and we put it right after the noun we're trying to

describe, which is the grammar book.

Here's another example.

"She lives in the city." "It is located next to Santa Monica."

So, in the first sentence we have the noun "the city" and in the second sentence

we have the pronoun "it." The "it" refers to "the city" so we combine these two

sentences, and we get "She lives in the city which is located next to Santa

Monica." We use with the relative pronoun "which" because "city" is a thing not a

person.