SREL Sentence relatives

Biber H34 Xiao J86

Definition

Relative clauses modifying an entire preceding clause.

Detection Rules

Sentence relatives: comma + which.

cql[word=","] [word="which"]

Requires: word

pybiber

pybiber uses UPOS PUNCT (any punctuation) before “which”, not just comma. Catches semicolon/dash-separated sentence relatives too.

cql[upos="PUNCT"] [word="which"]

Requires: word, pos, upos

Anchor: last

Normalization

Per finite_verbs

Examples

He left, which surprised everyone

Sources

  • biber_1988 — Biber, Douglas (1988) : Variation across Speech and Writing
  • pybiber — Brown, David West & Reinhart, Alex (2026) : pybiber — Python package for linguistic feature extraction and Multi-Dimensional Analysis
  • xiao_2009 — Xiao, Richard (2009) : Multidimensional analysis and the study of world Englishes

Notes

Not in MFTE. Requires syntactic parsing to distinguish from NP relatives.

View YAML source