yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Relative pronouns | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Grammarians, we're going to talk about relative pronouns today.

What relative pronouns do is they link clauses together, specifically independent and dependent clauses. If you don't know what independent and dependent clauses are, that's okay. Just suffice it to say that these pronouns allow you to staple phrases together.

For example, in the sentence, "The man who sold the world is coming by on Tuesday," the pronoun "who" is the relative pronoun there. It's linking the independent clause "the man is coming by on Tuesday" to the dependent clause "sold the world."

The relative pronouns of English are who, whom, whose, that, and which, and we use them all for different things. We can use who, whom, whose, and that to refer to people, and we can use whose, that, and which to refer to things.

Let me show you. You could say, "The salad that I bought was wilted," but at the same time, I can also use that in this sentence: "The man that I saw smiled." See, I'm using that to refer to him. I could also use who.

But the word which, however, does not play very nicely with people. In the sentence, "The witch who cast the spell is kind," we could use either "the witch who cast the spell" or "the witch that cast the spell" because both that and who work with people. However, which strangely does not.

So we couldn't say, for example, "The witch which owns a cat is cruel." That's just not how the language shook out. Which is not a relative pronoun that applies to people.

These are the relative pronouns of English. This is broadly how they work, and I'm going to get into more specifics in following videos. You can learn anything.

More Articles

View All
Comparing payment methods | Consumer credit | Financial Literacy | Khan Academy
Let’s say that we have decided to buy a television for $499, and we now need to think about how we are going to pay for this $499 television. We know we have many different options, and I’m presenting five of them to you in this video. We could pay with c…
Peter Lynch: How to Invest in an Overvalued Market
One thing you’re trying to do is say all these public companies out there, here’s the company I really like. The fundamentals are terrific, their earnings are doing well, the competitors are doing poorly. I think this company’s doing terrific, and all of …
How Does A Wing Actually Work?
Shh… I’ve snuck into minutephysics’ studio to explain how a wing actually works. Hang on, something doesn’t feel right. Ah, that’s better. Now everyone knows that a wing generates lift due to its characteristic shape. Since air travels farther over top …
Using matrices to manipulate data: Pet store | Matrices | Precalculus | Khan Academy
We’re told a certain pet store chain has three types of dog food, and each comes in bags of two different sizes. Matrix A represents the store’s inventory at location A, where rows are food types and columns are bag sizes. So, see, it’s store A that’s wha…
Avni Patel Thompson at the Seattle Female Founders Conference
So the first speaker you’re gonna hear today is Omnipotent Thompson, the founder of Poppy. Poppy is a site that connects parents with great caregivers for their children. So Omni and her co-founder went through Y Combinator in Winter 2016. She’s also an i…
Charlie Munger's 10 Secrets to Getting Rich
A lot of questions today. People trying to figure out what the secret to life is to a long and happy life. And I just wonder if you were—that is easy because it’s so simple. What is it? Don’t have a lot of envy. You don’t have a lot of resentment. You don…