Let's talk about interrogative and
relative pronouns. Now we've grouped these
together because they're very similar. So
if you look at interrogative pronouns,
these include "who," "whom," "whose" (lots of "who"
words), and then a couple more, "which" and
"what." And then if you look at the
relative pronouns, these are almost
identical. So we have "who," "whom," "whose"
(pretty much the same), "which," and then
there's one minor difference here:
instead of "what" we have "that." And that's the
only difference. So what's going on here?
Why do we have two categories? Well they
have a different function. And
interrogative pronouns have the function
of asking questions. Think of an
interrogation where you're asking
questions and trying to find answers. So
if you say, for instance, "who did that?" ...
That's a question, and we've used who in
the interrogative form. There are a couple of
other words that seem to fit into this
category as well; in fact they do, and
these are "whoever" and "whomever." But
these words are fairly rare, so you don't
necessarily have to remember these. And
the main ones are these five: "who," "whom," "whose,"
"which," and "what," which ask questions. So
interrogative pronouns are fairly
straightforward. Relative ones are a
little bit different and a little bit
trickier as well. So relative ones relate
extra information; think of them as
relating extra information. And they
typically introduce a dependent clause,
so they introduce a dependent clause. And
we'll just give you a quick example here,
if we say, "Bob, who emailed me,"
we can keep the
sentence going of course, but we have "Bob" ...
there's a noun, and then what "who" does,
what this relative pronoun does, is it
refers back to a noun and then it
introduces extra information about that
noun.
So this extra information, all of this
together, is the relative clause.
And a relative clause is
a kind of dependent clause.
So we start with our noun, then we
introduce some extra information and we
use the relative pronoun to introduce
that information.
One final observation: there are a few
other words that can act in the same way
as a relative pronoun. So these are words
like "what" and "when" and "where."
So these tend to be other parts of
speech, but you may see them acting like
a relative pronoun. So if we take an
example here, let's talk about "that time
when we went
bowling."
Then in
this case, "time" is our noun. "When" is
acting a bit like a relative pronoun (it
refers back to "time"), and then it
introduces this extra information. So we
can see the same kind of pattern even
though "when" is typically an adverb or
conjunction and is not usually included
as a relative pronoun. One extra thing to
notice here (I said there was only going
to be one final thing but here's one
more thing), "that" is often a relative
pronoun, but as we said in the video on
demonstrative pronouns, it can also be
a demonstrative pronoun, and in that case
it's pointing to something. So this
example here is of a demonstrative pronoun
and it refers to time. So which time?
That time. There's a kind of pointing
going on there. So that's it for
interrogative and relative pronouns.