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**The car, the wheel of which was broken, crashed into a tree.

The car of which the wheel broken crashed into a street

The bungalows of which the roofs are leaking ought to...

The bungalows the roofs of which are leaking ought to..**

= The bungalows ought to be sold, the roofs of which are leaking. = The bungalows, the roofs of which are leaking, ought to be sold

Are these the same? are my sentences correct?

And, would you please give me a more simpler pattern, as to how to use the following?

of which

Finally, when whose and when of which? I am very confused. Would you tell me more simple?

I am learning English

I am wondering the reason why the position of **of which** has been changed.

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Considering your explanations, what about these? I think both of these are correct, aren't they?

The car, the wheel of which was broken, crashed into a tree. correct

The car, of which the wheel was broken, crashed into a tree. wrong

tchrist
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nima
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  • The car, of which the wheel was broken = The car, of the car the wheel was broken = makes no sense. – Blessed Geek Aug 20 '14 at 07:53
  • You cannot use The car, of which the wheel was broken as a stand-alone sentence. There must be a preceding phrase, because the word which needs to substitute something other than the car. I gave you examples how to use such an unusual and complicated structure, which you actually should avoid. – Blessed Geek Aug 20 '14 at 08:06
  • whay about this?The bungalows of which are leaking the roofs ought to... – nima Aug 20 '14 at 19:38
  • you have written this, but you say that it is incorrect!The beautiful castle, and the bungalows of which the roofs are leaking out to be sold. – nima Aug 20 '14 at 20:05
  • I did not say mine is incorrect. I wrote that your initial sentence should not stand on its own. Your sentence stands on its own with a lonely which. My sentence has extra phrases, so that the word which is smiling and happy and has a friend. – Blessed Geek Aug 21 '14 at 01:48
  • When you find a relative clause in which there is a preposition or even a noun phrase and a preposition) in front of the relative pronoun, you have a case of what's technically called Pied-Piping the preposition (or extended NP) along with the relative pronoun while forming the relative clause. – John Lawler Dec 18 '14 at 17:57
  • @BlessedGeek: has this been edited out of recognition? At present OP's first sentence is perfectly fine, and your comment misleading at best. – Tim Lymington Jan 17 '15 at 16:18
  • What is "at best"? Why not "at worst"? At my best behaviour, or at my best attempts at misleading? – Blessed Geek Jan 18 '15 at 07:29
  • It's quite acceptable and often far simpler to use 'whose' even with inanimate referents: 'The car whose wheel was broken crashed into a street' // 'The car, whose wheel was broken, crashed into a street'. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 19 '15 at 23:07
  • @Blessed Greek "The car of which the wheel was broken", as a clause (obviously not a complete sentence), is not incorrect, but it sounds a bit 19th or even 18th Century. See below too. – Albatrosspro Oct 15 '15 at 07:48

2 Answers2

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The basic pattern for English relative clauses is that (1) the relative clause must have a relative pronoun (though it is sometimes deleted) and that (2) a constituent containing the relative pronoun must come first in the relative clause. If this requirement that a constituent containing the relative pronoun come first is not already met, something has to be moved to the front of the clause, so that the requirement will be met.

In your example The car, the wheel of which was broken, crashed into a tree, both requirements are met. The relative clause is the wheel of which was broken, and (1) it does contain a relative pronoun, which, and (2) a constituent containing that relative pronoun, the wheel of which, comes first in the relative clause. So nothing happens. This is why your last example is bad, because nothing needs to be moved to the front in order to satisfy (2).

Greg Lee
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  • I'm not following your reasoning here. By “your last example”, you mean “The car, of which the wheel was broken…”, right? Your last sentence conflicts with your definition of (2), as far as I can tell: (2) requires that the ‘relative constituent’ be first in the clause, and if it isn't, it must be moved there. That criterion is fulfilled in both cases here, and unless my brain is working backwards, it's the one you deem okay that doesn't require any moving… – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 16 '15 at 19:29
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    Also, you seem to be ignoring the fact that both versions are in fact completely grammatical—they're just awkward because of which to express possession tends to be awkward. But there's nothing wrong with “Eldorado, the road to which was lost for centuries, was rediscovered by Indiana Jones”, nor with “Eldorado, to which the road was lost for centuries…”—though again, both could be phrased more elegantly. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 16 '15 at 19:35
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    You should read my (2) more carefully. In the example I discuss, as I pointed out, a constituent containing the relative pronoun, the wheel of which, since it is the subject of the relative clause, comes first in the relative clause. Subjects come first in English. This satisfies (2), so no movement takes place. (2) does not require that, as your version says, "the 'relative constituent' be first in the clause". I find your example "Eldorado, to which the road was lost, ..." to be completely unacceptable. – Greg Lee Feb 16 '15 at 19:50
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    When I wrote “the ‘relative constituent’ be first in the clause”, I of course meant that the constituent containing the relative pronoun must come first in the relative clause—an exact quote of your definition. So if (A) (the wheel of which) is fine when nothing needs to move, I don't understand how you can say that (B) is bad because nothing needs to move! How about this, then: “The 18–20 voter group, of which the vast majority were first-time voters, did not have a lower voter turnout than any other group”? That is not even awkward to me, it is very natural. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 16 '15 at 19:55
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    No, go back and read (2) once more, because you've misrepresented it yet again. It says a constituent containing the relative pronoun must come first, not the constituent. In a complicated construction, there can be a number of constituents that contain the relative pronoun. If any one of them comes first in the relative clause, (2) is satisfied. – Greg Lee Feb 16 '15 at 20:02
  • All right, “a constituent containing the relative pronoun must come first in the relative clause. If this requirement that a constituent containing the relative pronoun come first is not already met, something has to be moved to the front of the clause, so that the requirement will be met”, then (if that's still wrong, it's not my fault—it’s copy-pasted from your answer). That was never my point. You're completely ignoring what I'm saying. A constituent containing the relative pronoun *does* come first in the relative clause, in *both* (A) and (B). – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 16 '15 at 20:07
  • In (A), no movement is necessary, and you say that's fine. No problems there. In (B), a movement takes place, which is also fine according to the definition of (2) (second sentence), yet here you say that (B) “is bad, because nothing needs to be moved to the front in order to satisfy (2)”, which is the same as for (A). That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to me. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 16 '15 at 20:08
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    I'll admit that your last "voter" example does sound better. But let's consider the derivation. The relative clause is "the vast majority of the 18-20 voter group were first-time voters" with "the 18-20 voter group relativized to "which", giving "the vast majority of which were first-time voters". The subject of this is the NP "the vast majority of which", and that NP contains the relative pronoun. So (2) is met and there is no movement. "Of which" does not come first in the relative clause, and to get it there, you'd have to move it. So my characterization rules out your example. – Greg Lee Feb 16 '15 at 20:14
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    Reading over your comments, as best I can tell, you're treating my statements as a surface condition, while actually I've given a derivational constraint, which says when there will and will not be movement in the derivation of the relative clause. – Greg Lee Feb 16 '15 at 20:19
  • But that's no different from “of which the wheel was broken”, which is similarly equal to “the wheel of the car was broken” -> “the wheel of which was broken” (no movement = A) -> “of which the wheel was broken” (movement = B). I don't see how there is any difference syntactically between the two. It's only the level to which it sounds awkward that differs, and that's not a matter of strict syntax here. “Of which the majority” is the subject = “the majority of which”, and “of which the wheel” is the subject = “the wheel of which”. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 16 '15 at 20:22
  • (Note: the movement here is of course inside the subject constituent, which is partly why I don't see what constituent movement really has to do with the acceptability of either version.) – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 16 '15 at 20:25
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    Can you say *"Of the car the wheel was broken"? Sounds bad, to me. Prepositional phrases within a NP don't ordinarily come first. Assuming the underlying order is "the wheel of the car", to get into first position, "of the car", or in the relative clause "of which", would have to be moved there. But the result of such a movement is an ungrammatical construction (as I understand the facts), so why suppose any such thing ever happens? No reason. I'm just really not following your difficulty. – Greg Lee Feb 16 '15 at 20:41
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    While I was trying to sleep off my fever on my flight just now, I realised that such movement is possible with partitive of, but not with possessive of. So “one of them was…” can be transposed to “of them(,) one was…”, but “the wheel of the car was…” cannot be transposed to “of the car(,) the wheel” unless you allow for a lot of poetic licence. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 16 '15 at 21:51
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    Well, the GPSG treatment of relative clauses attributes the preposing of a relative expression in a relative clause to the independent rule of topicalization, so your observation supports that. If you can move something to the beginning of an independent clause, you can go ahead and do that and then relativize the clause, so then condition (2) is all that is necessary to tell whether the relative clause will be good. That might be worth writing an article about. – Greg Lee Feb 16 '15 at 22:31
  • @Greg Lee "Subjects come first in English." This statement is so ridiculous and ignorant, I can't believe you manage to write so many posts afterwards filled with so many big, fancy words. A lot of nonsense in here if you ask me. – Albatrosspro Oct 15 '15 at 08:01
  • @Janus Bahs Jacquet Filling you in, too – Albatrosspro Oct 15 '15 at 08:01
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The word which when not used to form a question, is a substitutional pronoun. You use it, to avoid having to repeat the subject you are describing.

For example,

  • I have a cat. The cat is a Maine coon.
    = I have a cat, which is a Maine coon.

  • I have a house. There is a roof over that house.
    = I have a house. Over that house is a roof.
    = I have a house, over which is a roof.

  • The beautiful castle ought to be sold. The roofs of the beautiful castle are leaking. The bungalows belonging to the castle ought to be sold.
    = The beautiful castle ought to be sold, the roofs of which are leaking. The bungalows of the castle ought to be sold.
    = The beautiful castle, and the bungalows of which the roofs are leaking out to be sold.

  • The bungalows ought to be sold. The roofs of the bungalows are leaking.
    = The bungalows ought to be sold, the roofs of which are leaking.
    = The bungalows, the roofs of which are leaking, ought to be sold.

  • The kavadi temples-on-wheels each had a car pulling them. One of the mobile temples had a wheel which was broken. The car had crashed into a tree.
    = One of the kavadi temples is stranded, because the car of which the wheel was broken had crashed into a tree.

Traditionally, whose is a pronoun usable as substitution to human entities. Whilst which is a pronoun normally used as substitution to non-human entities.

Then for people whose sense of humanity gave more respect for animals, we would include animals on the whose side vs the which side.

Then certain objects, like a ship, a boat or even a house with whom the owner of which had had an intimate connection would be included in the whose camp.

Finally, Canadian/US colloquial English did us in with the liberal usage of whose. Just like much of US/Canadian English - British English was haplessly and helplessly sucked into acquiescing to those patterns of usage. (In fact, while most of them would return to speaking in their River Thames or Mancurian (,etc) patois, somehow British singers would find it unusual and abnormal not to pronounce lyrics the US/Canadian way when singing their songs.)

Blessed Geek
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