THRCO That relative clauses on object position

child of THRC_ALL

Definition

Relative clauses introduced by “that” where “that” functions as the object of the relative clause verb.

Parent

THRC_ALL

Detection Rules

“That” as WDT functioning as object of the relative clause verb.

semgrex{word:/[Tt]hat/; pos:WDT}=that <dobj {pos:/VB.*/}=verb

Requires: word, pos, dep

pybiber

pybiber: “that” with dep containing “dobj”, preceded by a noun/CD/DT. The DT check uses contains-match to include PDT and WDT (matching pybiber’s str.contains(“DT”) which matches any tag containing “DT”). Does not require WDT tag on “that”.

cql[pos="N.*|CD|.*DT"] [word="that" & dep="dobj"]

Requires: word, pos, dep

Anchor: last

Normalization

Per finite_verbs

Examples

the ring that Bilbo found

the story that he told

Non-examples

the ring Bilbo found

Zero relative (that-deletion) — see THATD

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

Notes

Not listed with a separate dimension loading in Biber 1988. Object-position “that” competes with zero relative (“the ring Bilbo found”) and is less frequent than subject-position.

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