Adjective Clauses: More Uses of Relative Pronouns in English (WHICH, WHOM)

Hey there. It’s Jennifer here on a winter day in Massachusetts.

New England can be hot in the summer and brutally cold in the winter, but I like the climate.

I enjoy seeing nature change, which means I really like having four seasons.

In the past, I worked in a number of places, one of which was the Bahamas.

I remember how I wrote to a friend and asked her to send pictures of spring in Pennsylvania.

I missed the many different flowers, all of which make spring so special.

The tropical islands were beautiful, but I missed the weather back home.

Did you ever travel far from home?

The farther you travel, the more different life can be, which makes it hard to stay away from home for very long.

I’ve just given you a couple examples of how we can use WHICH to refer back to a whole idea and not just a single head noun. Look closer.

Notice the position of the relative pronoun WHICH.

It’s the first word of the adjective clause, but it refers back to the whole idea presented in the main clause.

Here is one more example:

But use of a relative pronoun allows us to combine the two ideas and show the close connection between them.

Let me challenge you with this variation:

Note that this is something you'd likely see in writing.

In conversation, we'd probably break up this long idea into more sentences.

In conversation, I might say:

So we could rewrite "in which case" as "which means if that's true, then..."

And we can use "which" as a relative pronoun to refer back to the whole idea or the whole fact presented in the main clause.

At the beginning of this lesson, I also gave you examples of WHICH with quantifiers.

Quantifiers answer the question "how much?" or "how many?"

In other words, I worked in a number of place. One of those places was the Bahamas.

In other words, I missed the many different flowers. All of those flowers make spring so special.

So these constructions with quantifiers allow us to refer back to a head noun and quantify it.

We can talk about one member of a group, some members of a group, or we can refer to all the members of a group.

And if it's a whole, we can talk about all of it, much of it, some of it, none of it.

We can create similar patterns with the relative pronoun WHOM to refer to all or some people.

Note that this kind of construction with a quantifier and WHOM sounds rather formal.

You'll see it more in writing. In everyday spoken English, I'd probably use shorter sentences.

Here are a couple of sentences you can complete for practice. I’ll offer corrections as time allows, but you can also help one another. Okay?

That’s all for now. I hope you found this lesson useful.

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Thanks for watching and happy studies!