WHSC WH subordinate clauses
Definition
Subordinate clauses introduced by a WH-word (e.g., “I know where he went”, “whoever comes”).
Detection Rules
WH subordinate clauses (WH-word, not ‘that’).
cql[pos="WRB|WP|WDT" & word!="that"]
mfte
MFTE tags WH-words as WHSC (line 767) AFTER WHQU has already consumed WH-question tokens. So WHSC = all WH-words minus those in questions.
cql[pos="WRB|WP|WP\$|WDT" & word!="that"]
combine: _ & !WHQU
pybiber
WH clause: WH-word (tag starts with W, not “which”) immediately following a verb (coarse POS = VERB, not AUX). pybiber subtracts WH relative counts (f_31 + f_32) from this total to avoid double-counting.
cql[upos="VERB"] [pos="W.*" & word!="which"]
combine: _ & -WHREL_SUBJ & -WHREL_OBJ
Normalization
Per finite_verbs
Examples
I’m thinking of someone who is not here today.
Source: le_foll_2024
Do you know whether the banks are open?
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
- xiao_2009 — Xiao, Richard (2009) : Multidimensional analysis and the study of world Englishes
Notes
Biber also counted WH relative clauses on subject (.45) and object (.63) positions separately for D3.