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completeness is manifested by some deictic elements (determinants) before the antecedent (mainly articles,
demonstrative pronouns, or words with a demonstrative or particularizing meaning, such as the same, the only,
the best). The presence of such elements is justified only if the attributive clause is following. For example:
A library is a place where they keep books.
She had become aware of the fact that she was talking loudly.
In these sentences the main part taken separately is not clear because of the article which has a classifying
(the first sentence) or a demonstrative force (the second sentence) and therefore requires some explanation in
the form of an attributive clause or some context to make explicit what kind of place the library was, what fact
was meant.
In some cases the dropping of the attributive clause does not make the main clause incomplete, but its
meaning becomes altogether different from the meaning it has in the complex sentence. For example, compare
the sentences:
a) Aren’t you the young man who married Fleur Forsyte? (that particular man, Fleur Forsyte’s husband)
b) Aren’t you the young man? (that particular man known to the speaker and the listener, with no further
information for the reader)
Limiting clauses may be joined by a connective with a preposition. These are analogous to prepositional
attributes.
This is the man about whom we spoke yesterday.
She inclined more and more to that peace and quietness of which Montague Dartie had deprived her in
her youth.
§ 160. Attributive clauses may be joined to the main clause without a relative word, that is, asyndetically.
They are called contact clauses.
Contact clauses are always limiting, for both the main and the subordinate clause complete each
other. Thus in the sentence The hum I had heard was the combined result of their whispered repetitions the
clause I
had heard makes no sense unless the antecedent hum in the main clause makes the meaning of the
predicate had heard (and thus the clause itself) complete, though formally the word hum cannot be considered
as the direct object of the predicate. Some more examples of the same kind:
He was a man one always forgot.
I know where she kept that packet she had.
I used to learn by heart the things they’d written.
This is the kind of job I’d like.
As can be seen from the above examples, contact clauses are possible only in cases where the antecedent is
semantically acceptable in the position of a direct object, prepositional object, or of a predicative in the
subordinate clause.
He was a man one always forgot - One always forgot such a man.
I used to learn by heart the things they’d written – They’d written things.
Sentences in which the main and the subordinate clauses have a common part which functions as the subject
in the subordinate clause are used nowadays only in dialects and in fiction to give the narration local colour.
These are called apokoinu sentences:
Perhaps it was his scars suggested it (his scars suggested it).
John’s was the last name would have occurred to me (the last name would have occurred to me).
The next morning there was a boy came to see me (a boy came to see me).