Editing Relative clause (section)

====Gapped relative clause====
In this strategy, there is simply a gap in the relative clause where the shared noun would go. This is normal in English, for example, and also in Chinese and Japanese. This is the most common type of relative clause, especially in [[subject–object–verb|verb-final]] languages with prenominal relative clauses, but is also widespread among languages with postnominal externally headed relative clauses.

There may or may not be any marker used to join the relative and main clauses. (Languages with a case-marked relative pronoun are technically not considered to employ the gapping strategy even though they do in fact have a gap, since the case of the relative pronoun indicates the role of the shared noun.) Often the form of the verb is different from that in main clauses and is to some degree nominalized, as in Turkish and in English [[reduced relative clause]]s.<ref>{{cite book | last=Carrol | first=David W. | edition=5th | title=Psychology of Language | publisher=Thomson & Wadsworth | location=Belmont | year=2008 |isbn=9780495099697 |oclc=144326346}}</ref><ref>{{cite book | last1=Townsend | first1=David J. |first2=Thomas G. |last2=Bever  | title=Sentence Comprehension: The Integration of Habits and Rules | year=2001 | publisher=MIT Press | location=Cambridge | pages=247&ndash;9 |oclc=45487549}}</ref>

In non-verb-final languages, apart from languages like [[Thai language|Thai]] and [[Vietnamese language|Vietnamese]] with very strong politeness distinctions in their grammars{{Citation needed|date=December 2011}}, gapped relative clauses tend, however, to be restricted to positions high up in the accessibility hierarchy. With obliques and genitives, non-verb-final languages that do not have politeness restrictions on pronoun use tend to use pronoun retention. English is unusual in that ''all'' roles in the embedded clause can be indicated by gapping: e.g. "I saw the person who is my friend", but also (in progressively less accessible positions cross-linguistically, according to the ''[[accessibility hierarchy]]'' described below) "...&nbsp;who I know", "...&nbsp;who I gave a book to", "...&nbsp;who I spoke with", "...&nbsp;who I run slower than". Usually, languages with gapping disallow it beyond a certain level in the accessibility hierarchy, and switch to a different strategy at this point. [[Classical Arabic]], for example, only allows gapping in the subject and sometimes the direct object; beyond that, a resumptive pronoun must be used. Some languages have no allowed strategies at all past a certain point—e.g. in many [[Austronesian languages]], such as [[Tagalog language|Tagalog]], all relative clauses must have the shared noun serving the subject role in the embedded clause. In these languages, relative clauses with shared nouns serving "disallowed" roles can be expressed by [[passive voice|passivizing]] the embedded sentence, thereby moving the noun in the embedded sentence into the subject position. This, for example, would transform "The person who I gave a book to" into "The person who was given a book by me". Generally, languages such as this "conspire" to implement general relativization by allowing passivization from ''all'' positions — hence a sentence equivalent to "The person who is run slower than by me" is grammatical. Gapping is often used in conjunction with case-marked relative pronouns (since the relative pronoun indicates the case role in the embedded clause), but this is not necessary (e.g. Chinese and Japanese both using gapping in conjunction with an indeclinable complementizer).