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  • In this short video we'll be discussing relative clauses, also known as adjective

  • 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.

In this short video we'll be discussing relative clauses, also known as adjective

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