The place of relative pronouns and verbs in a sentence

The words ‘who’, ‘whom’, ‘which’, ‘whoever’, ‘whomever’, ‘whichever’, and ‘that’ are known as relative pronouns in the English language. A relative pronoun connects a phrase to a noun or pronoun. Thus, in reference to the latest election petition against President Uhuru Kenyatta following his October 26 win, one can say, ‘the lawyers whom he hired to argue his case are renowned’.

Relative pronouns

The place of the relative pronoun ‘that’ in a sentence is after a definite pronoun. Definite pronouns refer to a specific person or thing. They are, ‘everything’, ‘all’ and ‘something’. In the case referred to above, we can say: ‘The Supreme Court Judges wrote down everything that was presented to them as evidence before retiring to write their individual judgements’. In conversation, ‘that’ can replace ‘whom’. ‘The students whom he taught chemistry last year passed their examination’ and ‘The students that he taught chemistry last year passed their examination’ are both correct.

The words ‘someone’, anybody’, everybody’, ‘each’ and ‘either’ are called singular, indefinite pronouns. Indefinite pronouns do not refer to any particular thing or person. ‘All’, ‘any’, ‘none’ and ‘some’ are indefinite pronouns that are both singular and plural while ‘both’, ‘few’ and ‘many’ are plural, indefinite pronouns.

There is an exception to using ‘that’ in place of ‘whom’ when the latter is used with a preposition. For example, ‘the lady with whom I discussed the military coup in Zimbabwe is John’s cousin. Notably too, it would be atrocious to replace ‘who’ with ‘that’ when the relative clause is within commas, for example, ‘Orengo, who happens to be a Senator, is also a lawyer of repute’. You cannot say or write, ‘Orengo, that happens to be a Senator, is also a lawyer of repute’.

The relative pronoun ‘whose’ refers to persons while ‘which’ refers to things and animals or a group of people. ‘Which’ can precede either a noun, pronoun or verb. The following examples illustrate this : ‘ He snatched away the magazine which Mary had been reading’, ‘the machine which produces colour photocopies has broken down’. ‘Which’ can be used in place of ‘that’ in joining sentences. The following two sentences : ‘The train from Mombasa is late. It should have arrived at noon’ can be written as one sentence by inserting ‘which’ to read ‘The train from Mombasa, which should have arrived at noon, is late’.

Verbs, used to express action, are categorised as; main verbs, helping verbs, action or linking verbs and the transitive/intransitive verbs. Among the most common helping verbs are ; be, was, were, has, could, did, does, are, should, will and would. Helping verbs assist the main verb in expressing action. Action verbs are expressive of a physical or mental activity. These include (physical) laugh, leap, sneeze, shout, paint run (mental activity) wish, understand, dream or realise.

Linking verbs include, am, seems, taste, being, grow, were, appear, been, look and become. Transitive verbs express action directed towards a person, place or thing. In saying ‘Yvonne held her baby’, the action of holding is directed towards the baby. On the other hand, intransitive verbs tells something about the subject. An example is, ‘ the triplets played quietly indoors the whole day while their parents worked on the farm’. It is worth noting that a verb can be transitive in one sentence yet intransitive in another. For example, ‘Samson swam ten laps’ (transitive) and ‘Samson swam well’ (intransitive).

Regular verbs

It is also important to distinguish between regular and irregular verbs. Regular verbs change very little when applied to past tenses or past participles. One can either add ‘.. ed’ or ‘.. d’ to turn a regular verb into a past tense or a past participle. Examples are ‘Learn, learned, learned’, ‘cook, cooked, cooked’. Irregular verbs, on the other hand do not follow a set pattern when they are being turned into past tenses or past participles. Examples are ‘grow, grew, grown’, ‘begin, began, begun’, ‘speak, spoke, spoken’ and ‘drive, drove, driven’.

Finally, do you know that written English has been around for more than 1300 years? The English language has gone through three phases, namely, Old, Middle and Modern English. In Old English, the word ‘silly’ meant ‘happy and blessed’. In Middle English, it assumed the meaning of ‘harmless’ and in Modern English, it means ‘foolish’!

Mr Chagema is a correspondent at The [email protected]