4.13 Relative pronouns qui, que, où, dont — Epoché
What you will be able to do Choose between the four words that join a clause to a noun, using one question about the clause rather than a translation. Recognise that French never drops the joining word, and stop producing the English sentence with a hole in it. Use the fourth of the four, which corresponds to nothing in English at all and covers both possession and any complement introduced by the preposition meaning of . Say what English does instead, including the two English habits — dropping the word and stranding the preposition — that produce impossible French. Sentences from this lesson, before the explanation. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English La femme qui parle est grande. [1] The woman who is speaking is tall. Le garçon qui chante est excellent. [2] The boy who is singing is excellent. J'ai un ami qui est docteur. [3] I have a friend who's a doctor. Prerequisites : 4.12 — you need the object pronouns from 4.9 and the prepositions from earlier in the volume. Several sentences here are in the perfect, a past form you met in 3.8 (a form of avoir or être followed by a past participle); in this lesson only the joining word matters. See 4.12 Grammar if you need it. A relative clause is a clause stuck onto a noun in order to say more about it: the woman who is speaking, the book you are looking for, the house where he was born. Both languages build them, both put them after the noun, and the words involved look like a neat set of correspondences. They are not, and the reason is not in the French but in English. English allows two things French forbids. The first is dropping the joining word altogether when it is the object of the clause. The book you are looking for has no joining word in it, and most English speakers cannot say offhand which word has been dropped. The second is leaving a preposition at the end of the clause, stranded, with nothing after it. Both habits are so automatic that a learner produces them in French without noticing. The result is not a slight awkwardness; it is a sentence a French speaker cannot parse, because the clause boundary has disappeared. Of everything in this volume, this is a common error that can persist into a learner's third year, and the fix is a habit rather than a rule: never build a relative clause in French without a word to start it. How English does it English drops the relative pronoun when it is the object; French never drops anything. The man I saw and the man whom I saw are both English, and the first is far commoner. In French the clause must begin with the joining word, always, in every register, in speech and in writing alike. If you translate the English sentence word for word you get a French sentence with two clauses jammed together and nothing to mark where one ends. English strands prepositions; French puts them in front. The place I told you about leaves the preposition dangling at the end. French has no such construction: a preposition must stand in front of something. When the something is a relative pronoun, the preposition goes at the front of the clause with the pronoun after it — and in the particular case of the preposition meaning of , a single word does the whole job. English chooses its relative pronoun by what the noun is; French chooses by what the clause needs. English picks between who and which according to whether the noun is a person or a thing, and adds that as an alternative to both. For subjects and objects, French makes no distinction between people and things (after a preposition it does, which lesson 4.24 covers). It picks according to whether the joining word is the subject of its clause or its object, which is information English encodes only in the rare form whom . English has whose ; French has a word that covers whose and much more. The fourth word in this lesson does the work of whose , of of which , and of every clause whose verb requires the preposition meaning of . Because that last category is large and invisible from English, this is the word learners avoid, and avoiding it produces paraphrases that are always longer and usually wrong. English uses where for places and when for times; French uses one word for both. The word you learned as a question word meaning where serves as a relative for places and also for times, so the day on which something happened and the house in which somebody lives take the same word. English needs two, and English speakers reach for a translation of when that does not exist in this role. The subject one If the joining word is the subject of its own clause — if the verb immediately following it has no other subject — you use the first of the four. It covers people and things alike, and it never changes form. French English La femme qui parle est grande. [1] The woman who is speaking is tall. Le garçon qui chante est excellent. [2] The boy who is singing is excellent. J'ai un ami qui est docteur. [3] I have a friend who's a doctor. Avez-vous des employés qui parlent français ? [4] Do you have any employees who speak French? In all four, the word after the joining word is a verb with no subject of its own, which is exactly the test. The English glosses all use the same word, since all four nouns are people or things treated as agents, but that is a coincidence of these particular sentences: a French relative clause about a table would use the same joining word as one about a woman. The first and second sentences are worth reading twice for a different reason. The relative clause sits between the noun and the main verb, so the sentence has two verbs in a row near the middle and the reader has to hold the main verb in suspense. French tolerates it better and you will meet it constantly. The object one, and the missing word If the joining word is the object of its clause — if a subject of its own follows — you use the second of the four. This is the case English usually leaves unmarked, and therefore the case to be careful about. Frenc