In this short video we'll be discussing object relative clauses with
prepositions.
This is the third type of relative clause we'll be discussing. With object
relative clauses with prepositions again we start with two separate
sentences, and we're going to use the second sentence as the relative clause.
We have the first sentence, "The student is from Rwanda." "You spoke to her in the
library."
So, again we're looking for a noun that is in both the first sentence and in the
second sentence.
So, "the student" is the noun we want to describe, and if we look at the second
sentence, "You spoke to her in the library," "her" is referring to the student, but
notice in this sentence "her" is the object of the proposition "to". Keep that
in mind because that's going to be important when we write the final formal
version of this sentence with a relative clause.
So, as usual we put the second sentence into the first sentence and we get "The
student whom you spoke to in the library is from Rwanda."
So, we moved "her" to the front of the relative clause and we replaced "her" with
"whom" the relative pronoun.
We know that we have to use "whom" because a student is a person.
One last thing we do is we move the preposition to the front of the relative
clause.
So, we have this sentence, "The student to whom you spoke in the library is from
Rwanda." This sentence may sound a little strange, but this is actually the most
formal way to write a sentence with an object relative clause with a
preposition in it.
Let's look at another example.
"The exam is tomorrow. "You are studying for the exam."
So, in this sentence "the exam" is the same as "the exam" in the second sentence, but
in this case you see that we have a proposition so "the exam" is an object of
the preposition. We're going to combine these two sentences, and we have "The exam which
you are studying for is tomorrow." We move "the exam" to the front of the relative
clause.
We replaced it with "which" because the exam is a thing,
and for the last step we move the preposition "for" to the front of the
relative clause, and we get the formal sentence "The exam for which you are
studying is tomorrow.'
Let's take a look at a larger example. "The grammar textbook can be purchased in
the bookstore."
"The professor was talking about the textbook."
We again have two sentences. We want to use the second sentence as the
relative clause.
We need to look for the noun in the first sentence that is the same in the
second sentence, and we have "the grammar textbook."
We want to describe the grammar textbook because we have it here in the first
sentence, and it's also in the second sentence.
Now we're going to combine the sentences.
We have "The grammar textbook which the professor was talking about can be
purchased in the bookstore."
So, we move the textbook to the front of the relative clause right after the
grammar textbook, and we replaced it with the relative pronoun "which" and again we
use "which" because a grammar textbook is a thing, and to make this sentence more
formal, we're going to
move the preposition "about" to the front of the relative clause, and we get
this sentence "The grammar text book about which the professor was talking
can be purchased in the bookstore."
Now take a look at this sentence. We'll go through the steps, and you can try to figure
out what the final sentence is going to be.
Here's another example "The university is not accepting any more students."
"Maria applied to this University" So, you can try combining these two sentences.
Again, use the second sentence as a relative clause to describe a noun in
the first sentence.
In this example, we have "The woman is a professor at UCLA."
"You sat behind her on the bus yesterday."
Combine the two sentences using the second sentence as the relative clause.
And for our last example, we have "New York University is the university." "Many
students apply to this university, but few students are accepted."
Try to combine these two sentences again.