Complex sentences

Adding qualifying details

If you've done the lesson on Noun Groups then you might remember the concept of a qualifier:

As they walked into the terminal, a blond woman in a hot pink suit ran up to them.

Mosquito Advertising: The Blade Brief(2011)

Qualifiers add extra detail to a thing—they help us be more specific.

(Not just any woman, but a woman in a hot pink suit.)

Often qualifiers appear as noun groups inside prepositional phrases—essentially qualifying one person or thing with another thing (a woman in a hot pink suit).

But we can also qualify people and things with events (which require a supporting clause).

For example:

As they walked into the terminal, a blond woman who was holding a chipmunk ran up to them.

This time, instead of qualifying her with a thing (a hot pink suit) we've qualified her with a supporting event (holding a chipmunk).

Here's another example: what additional event-based detail do we get about the airlock in this snippet?

The rear of the trailer has an airlock that we're not going to mess with.

The Martian(2014)

What type of airlock is it?

One that we're not going to mess with.

Write a similar sentence using 'that' to add a qualifying detail about a noun.

It's worth noticing that we often need words such as 'who', 'that', or 'which'  to connect to supporting clauses that add detail to a noun group.

These words are called relative pronouns.

  • They fill a grammatical ‘subject’ or ‘object’ role in the clause.
  • They show that the clause is inside the noun group (as a qualifier).

But really, that’s just a very technical way to say that they help us add details about people/things.

Can you find the relative pronouns in these snippets?

He looked at the guard who sat slumped in his seat.

Holes(1998)

Like most people, she was terrible at things she didn't like.

Mosquito Advertising: The Blade Brief(2011)

Yeah, okay, it's a trick. But here's where the pronoun would be:

"Like most people, she was terrible at things (that) she didn’t like."

Because language is about efficiency, a lot of the time we can drop ‘that’ from supporting clauses. However it’s still there, sort of like an implied subject.

Whether you include ‘that’ or not is up to you and what you think sounds better. Just be sure not to remove it from a clause that actually needs it. (Like that one—"from a clause actually needs it" doesn’t work.)

My mother looks at my father, who is looking off toward the window.

Written in the Stars(2015)

How many fridges are in each of these sentences?

  • I got the apple from the fridge which was humming.
  • I got the apple from the fridge, which was humming.

In the second sentence there is one fridge. But in the first sentence, there appears to be more than one, but only one of them is humming?

English makes a distinction between qualifying clauses that identify a specific person/thing and qualifying clauses that simply add more information about a person/thing. 

Here’s an example of the ‘identifying’ kind:

  • Like most people, she was terrible at things she didn’t like.

The qualifying clause in this case is identifying exactly which things she is terrible at.

If we removed the qualifying clause, we’d get:

  • Like most people, she was terrible at things.

This makes it sound like she’s terrible at “things in general”, rather than the specific set of things that she doesn’t like.

Here's an example of the ‘non-identifying’ kind, which is just adding extra detail:

  • My mother looks at my father, who is looking off toward the window.

The qualifying clause in this case is adding more information about the father, but we don’t need that clause to understand who the mother is looking at. We get that information from the main clause:

  • My mother looks at my father.

So about the comma

Commas create pauses, which help to separate ideas. Because 'non-identifying' qualifiers are slightly separate from the noun group they modify, we use a comma to show that separation.

The comma is important, and can change the meaning of your sentence if you don’t use it correctly. 

Back to our sentences about the humming fridge: 

  • I got the apple from the fridge which was humming.
  • I got the apple from the fridge, which was humming.

Both of these are qualifying clauses describing the fridge as “humming”, but:

  • In the first, it’s an ‘identifying’ clause—the fridge is being defined as “the specific fridge that hums”. 
  • In the second, it’s a ‘non-identifying’ clause (shown by the comma)—the fridge “just happened to be humming when I got the apple”.
Write a complex sentence where you add more detail about a person/thing using a relative pronoun (‘that’, ‘who’, ‘which’, ‘whose’, ‘where’, ‘when’).
Previous page