THRC That relative clauses on subject position
Definition
Relative clauses introduced by “that” where “that” functions as the subject of the relative clause (e.g., “the man that came”, “the ring that was lost”).
Parent
Detection Rules
“That” as WDT functioning as subject of the relative clause verb.
semgrex{word:/[Tt]hat/; pos:WDT}=that <nsubj {pos:/VB.*/}=verb
pybiber
“that” with dep nsubj or nsubjpass, preceded by noun, cardinal, or determiner. pybiber uses dep_rel.str.contains(“nsubj”) to match both active and passive subjects, and requires the preceding token to be N*/CD/DT to filter out demonstrative “That” at sentence start.
cql[pos="NN|NNS|NNP|NNPS|CD|DT"] [word="that" & dep="nsubj|nsubjpass"]
All “that” as relative pronoun. Requires post-filter to distinguish subject from object position.
cql[word="that" & pos="WDT"]
mfte
MFTE tags all that_WDT as THRC (line 762). Does not distinguish subject from object position. Pure POS-tag based.
cql[word="[Tt]hat" & pos="WDT"]
Normalization
Per finite_verbs
Examples
You must be very clever to find a use for something that costs nothing.
Source: le_foll_2024
I’ll just run a cable that goes from here to there.
Source: le_foll_2024
Sources
- biber_1988 — Biber, Douglas (1988) : Variation across Speech and Writing
- mfte — Le Foll, Elen & Shakir, Muhammad (2023/2025) : Multi-Feature Tagger of English (MFTE) — Python version
- pybiber — Brown, David West & Reinhart, Alex (2026) : pybiber — Python package for linguistic feature extraction and Multi-Dimensional Analysis
Notes
D6 loading .46. MFTE merges subject and object positions. Biber counted them separately.