A Word Please
by June Casagrande

June Casagrande

Which sentence would you rather hear someone say to you? "The people who give you money deserve praise" or "The people, who give you money, deserve praise."

If you chose the second one, it means you sense the power of restrictive versus nonrestrictive clauses. Either that or you're Rupert Murdoch. That's because the first sentence suggests that only some people give you money. The second suggests that all people give you money. How? Through the power of clauses.

A clause, if you'll recall from school, is usually a unit containing a subject and a verb. "I love," "you drive," "he wants." Coincidentally, that's also the minimum criteria for a complete sentence. So a clause can be a complete sentence, "I know," or part of a bigger one, "I know about last night."

A relative clause is a specific type of clause -- one that comes after a noun to describe it or help identify it. In "the man whom I love," the clause "I love" is now working to help clarify which man I'm talking about. As the "Oxford English Grammar" puts it, a relative clause is one that "postmodifies a noun."

So the clause "you drive" can help identify a car in "The car that you drive." The clause "he wants" can shed light on the noun "job" in "The job that he wants."

Those of you still awake may have noticed that these clauses aren't doing the job alone. In order to transform "he wants" into a descriptor, I threw in "that." That's because relative clauses are usually introduced with relative pronouns -- "that," "which" or "who/whom" -- and when they're not, the relative pronoun is nonetheless implied.

"The car that I was driving" means the same thing as "the car I was driving." The dropped pronoun is called the "zero relative." It's a valid option anytime you feel the extra word is unnecessary.

Relative clauses come in two types: restrictive and nonrestrictive -- also sometimes called "essential" and "nonessential" or "defining" and "nondefining." A restrictive relative clause quite literally restricts the field of possible subjects. It narrows down a larger group to help the reader understand which one is being discussed. Think about the difference between "the car was going fast" and "the car that exploded was going fast." The car in the first sentence could be any of a million different cars. But in the second sentence, "that exploded" significantly narrows down the field of cars we could be talking about. The relative clause narrows down our range of possibilities.

This is subtle stuff. For example, if the reader already knows which car is "the car," that changes things. "That exploded" then no longer helps the reader narrow down a field.

Nonrestrictive clauses are the other kind: They usually take "which" and, more important, they should be set off with commas. They can usually be taken right out of a sentence without creating confusion about the subject. My car, which had exploded, was a Chrysler.

That brings us back to the money.

When I say, "People who give you money," I'm narrowing down "people" to a subset. There are a lot of people in the world and among them are those who give you money. But, when I treat "who give you money" as a nonrestrictive clause -- which I convey with that crucial pair of commas -- I'm saying that the clause "who give you money" is just an extra bit of info. It in no way narrows down "people" as a whole. "People -- and they all give you money, by the way -- should be praised."

That's why readers who stuck it out to the end of this column definitely deserve praise and perhaps even some of that money.

-- June Casagrande is author of "Mortal Syntax: 101 Language Choices That Will Get You Clobbered by the Grammar Snobs -- Even If You're Right." She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.