The parameter
A relative clause lets a whole clause modify a noun. Two things vary: where the clause sits in relation to that noun, and how the noun's role inside the clause is signaled. English answers both in a way that feels inevitable and is not: it places the clause after the noun and links it with a pronoun that also states the role, who for a subject and whom for an object.
Most languages use a gap instead: the position the head would occupy inside the clause is simply empty, and the reader recovers the role from the verb. Comrie and Kuteva's WALS chapter on relativization on subjects counts, in a sample of 166 languages, 125 using a gap against 12 using a relative pronoun. The relative pronoun European grammar treats as standard is close to a European specialty.
The third variable is which noun can be relativized at all. Keenan and Comrie's accessibility hierarchy ranks the positions subject, direct object, indirect object, oblique, genitive, object of comparison, and states an implicational constraint: a language able to relativize any position can also relativize every position above it. Languages that cut the hierarchy high use a passive to promote the intended noun to a reachable position.
How languages vary
- Postnominal with relativizer: the clause follows the noun, introduced by a pronoun, particle or complementizer. English, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Swahili.
- Prenominal: the clause precedes the noun, normally in a participial form with no relative pronoun. Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Basque.
- Correlative: a full clause stands outside the main clause and is picked up inside it by a demonstrative: which girl you see there, she is my daughter. Hindi and Sanskrit are the standard cases.
- Internally headed: the head noun stays inside the relative clause. Reported for Navajo and for languages of the Americas and West Africa.
Dryer's WALS chapter 90 gives, for 824 languages, 579 with the clause after the noun, 141 with it before, 24 internally headed, 7 correlative and 64 mixed. Postnominal order is over four times as common, but the prenominal group holds languages a European translator meets constantly: Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin.
Consequences for translation
Between a prenominal and a postnominal language the reordering is compulsory and its scale is unusual: not two elements swapping places but a whole clause crossing its head. The source reader meets the modification first and the noun last; the target reader meets the noun first. That is a structure shift, and a unit shift where the clause is broken out as a sentence of its own.
Prenominal relatives are also less explicit. A participial relative has no relative pronoun, so the role of the head inside the clause is recovered from the verb alone, and nothing marks whether the modification is restrictive. English forces the translator to state the role, by choosing between who, which and that, and restrictiveness, through a comma. Both are explicitations that can be got wrong invisibly.
Three practical points.
The comma is a semantic mark in English and not in German. German punctuates every relative clause with a comma regardless of restrictiveness, so the mark carries no information. Copying German punctuation into English turns a restrictive clause into a non-restrictive one, which in a contract can change the scope of an obligation.
Length has a ceiling on the prenominal side. A prenominal language tolerates a long pre-head block, but the tolerance is finite: a heavy English postnominal chain going the other way usually has to be split into a sentence of its own, so the target sentence count differs.
Where the source could not relativize, it paraphrased. A language that cuts the accessibility hierarchy early uses a coordinated clause or a resumptive pronoun instead, and reading that as a relative clause is part of reading the source correctly.
Examples
TR>EN
- Source: geçen yıl imzalanan ve henüz yürürlüğe girmemiş olan anlaşma
- Target: the agreement which was signed last year and has not yet entered into force
- Comment: Eight words of modification precede the Turkish head noun; English states the head first and hangs the material after it. The participles carry no relative pronoun, so the role of the head inside each clause is inferred from the verb alone, while English has to name it.
EN>TR
- Source: The applicant, who had submitted the documents referred to in the previous paragraph, was heard on 4 May.
- Target: Bir önceki paragrafta atıfta bulunulan belgeleri sunan başvuru sahibi 4 Mayıs'ta dinlendi.
- Comment: Two nested English relative clauses become two participles stacked before the head noun, so the modification precedes the subject. The non-restrictive reading marked by the English commas cannot be marked in Turkish, and is lost or rebuilt as a separate sentence.
References
- Keenan, E. L. & Comrie, B. (1977). "Noun Phrase Accessibility and Universal Grammar." Linguistic Inquiry 8(1), 63–99.
- Dryer, M. S. (2013). "Order of Relative Clause and Noun." In Dryer, M. S. & Haspelmath, M. (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, Ch. 90. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
- Comrie, B. & Kuteva, T. (2013). "Relativization on Subjects." WALS Online, Ch. 122.
- Comrie, B. (1989). Language Universals and Linguistic Typology, 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Ch. 7.
- Andrews, A. D. (2007). "Relative Clauses." In Shopen, T. (ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Vol. 2, 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.