1127: Adjective Clauses Jan 9, 2018

Every child who's played Mad Libs® (and hopefully also those who haven't) knows what an adjective is. These descriptors aren't the only way to describe something though. Adjective clauses—not to be confused with an adjective phrase—act to describe a noun, just as an adjective would do, but do not contain an adjective. This is a type of adjunct, but unlike those that are prepositional phrases which act adverbially (e.g. 'in the house' in "we saw him in the house") adjective clauses rely upon relative pronouns like 'which' or 'who' or relative adverbs like 'where'. In languages besides English, these pronouns can agree in number and gender (but not grammatical case) with the noun they modify as well in the same way, more or less, that an adjective would have to. You can now support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts