said to have a gap, or zero, in the position of the object of the verb saw. Role Other arguments can be relativised using relative pronouns: Subject Hunter is the boy who helped Jessica. Object complement Hunter is the boy whom Jessica gave a gift to. Prepositional object Jack built the house in which I now live. (Similarly with prepositions and prepositional phrases in general, for example, These are the walls between which Jack ran.) Possessor Jack is the boy whose friend built my house. Variant forms In some languages with gender, number, and noun declensions—such as German, Serbo-Croatian, Hindi, and Latin—the relative pronoun agrees with its antecedent in gender and number, while its case indicates its relationship with the verb in the relative or main clause. In some other languages, the relative pronoun is an invariable word. Words used as relative pronouns often originally had other functions. For example, the English which is also an interrogative word. This suggests that relative pronouns might be a fairly late development in many languages. Some languages, such as Welsh, have no relative pronouns. In some languages such as Hindi, the relative pronouns are distinct from the interrogative pronouns. In English, different pronouns are sometimes used if the antecedent is a human being, as opposed to a non-human or an inanimate object (as in who vs. that). (1) This is a bank. This bank accepted my identification. (2) She is a bank teller. She helped us open an account. With the relative pronouns, sentences (1) and (2) would read like this: (3) This is the bank that accepted my identification. (4) She is the bank teller who helped us open an account. In sentences (3) and (4), the words that and who are the relative pronouns. The word that is used because the bank is a thing; the word who is used because the teller is a person. Alternatively, which is often used in defining (or restrictive) relative clauses in either case. For details see English relative clauses. See also Relativizer Relative pronouns in Spanish References Bibliography Gregory R. Guy and Robert Bayley, "On the Choice of Relative Pronouns in English", in American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage, 70.2 (1995), pp. 148-62. Iliev, Iv., The Origin of Bulgarian Relative Pronouns. Soojin Lee, "That or Which?: The that’s that of which is which, published in 2006, http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/courses/6362-lee.htm Contents. Summary. Pronouns