Adjectival clauses describe a noun or pronoun and are dependent clauses that cannot function as complete sentences. They use relative pronouns and serve an adjectival function, modifying the independent clause.
Adjectival clauses are dependent clauses in a sentence that perform an adjectival function, meaning that they describe a noun or pronoun. These types of clauses are often used in a situation where two sentences could be created, but combining them makes the flow of language easier or more effective. They are dependent clauses; this means that while adjectival clauses have both a subject and a verb or predicate, they cannot function on their own as complete sentences.
One of the most important aspects of adjective clauses is that they still play the role of adjectives within a sentence. An adjective is a word, phrase or clause that describes or modifies a noun or pronoun. In its simplest form, it’s typically a single word like “high” or “blue” in sentences like “high chair” or “blue water.”
Adjectives have the same function, but include multiple words together that describe a particular noun or pronoun. These are dependent clauses, which means they have the two elements required to be a clause, a subject and a verb, but they aren’t complete sentences that could stand on their own. Conversely, an independent clause is part of a sentence that can be isolated and become its own grammatically accurate sentence.
For example, the following sentence includes both an independent clause and a dependent clause: “I like people who run marathons.” The independent clause is “I like people,” which includes a subject in the pronoun form “I,” a verb or predicate “like,” and a direct object in the word “people.” The rest of this sentence, “who runs the marathon,” is not a complete sentence, although it could be if it were changed to “people run the marathon.” This makes it a dependent clause and it is also an adjective clause.
These adjectival clauses often use a relative pronoun to indicate the subject of the clause. In this case, it is the word “who”, a pronoun representing the word “people”, which is the direct object of the previous sentence. It is the subject of the dependent clause, however, followed by the verb “run”, which is the predicate. “Marathon” means what the subject does, but the whole clause doesn’t have enough information to act as a complete sentence.
The presence of a relative pronoun and the structure of a dependent clause usually identify adjectival clauses, although they must also serve an adjectival function. In the example above, it modifies or describes the “people” the subject of the first clause likes. A similar example would be a sentence such as “The man wears brown hats”, where the clause “that they are brown” functions as an adjective to describe the “hats”. These adjectival clauses typically use the relative pronouns “that, which, who, who, whose” and modify some aspects of the independent clause.
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