Common mistakes with 'which', 'that', 'whose' & 'what' | English grammar lesson | relative pronouns

When do we use the relative pronoun 'which'?

Can we use the word 'that' instead of 'which'?

What about the word 'what'? Is it a relative pronoun?

And 'whose'. Can we use 'whose' with objects?

I know that's a lot of questions, but by the end of the lesson, you will know the

answers and you will be able to use these words correctly every time.

Hello and welcome everyone, this is Minoo at Anglo-Link.

A quick reminder to download my free guide in the description box that

explains to you how you can improve your spoken fluency through different listening activities.

Now, let's start by reminding ourselves what a relative pronoun is.

A relative pronoun connects

a noun to a clause that gives us information about that noun.

When the noun is a person, we use the relative pronouns 'who', 'whom', and 'whose'.

I cover these in another lesson which you can find here.

In today's lesson, we're going to focus on relative pronouns for objects.

These are 'which', 'that', and 'whose'.

We'll also look at the word 'what', which is not a relative pronoun but is often confused as one.

Okay! Let's start with the relative pronoun 'which'.

Let's say someone says:

This is the movie.

Naturally, you would ask:

Which movie?

And the answer is for example:

The movie, which won 11 Oscars in 1997.

The part that gives the information is called a relative clause.

So, 'which' is the relative pronoun, and 'which won 11 Oscars in 1997' is the relative clause.

Now, we call this one an 'essential' or 'defining relative clause'.

Now, that's a big name. But, all it means is that we cannot remove it from the sentence.

Because if we remove it, we're back to the situation 'which movie'.

We also have 'non-essential' or 'non-defining relative clauses'

and these give extra information about the noun. But, they can be dropped from the sentence and the

sentence is still complete.

For example, if I say:

This is the movie Titanic, which won 11 Oscars in 1997.

So, this phrase now 'which won 11 Oscars in 1997', gives additional information.

I can drop it and say:

This is the movie Titanic. The sentence is complete.

We don't need to ask:

Which movie are you talking about?

A very common question is:

Can we use 'that' instead of 'which'?

And the answer is...

Yes! But, only with an essential relative clause.

So, we can say:

This is the movie that won 11 Oscars in 1997.

Remember here it's an essential clause.

But in the other example:

This is the movie Titanic, which won 11 oscars in 1997.

We cannot use 'that'.

Only 'which' works in non-essential relative clauses.

So, now let's look at the relative pronoun 'whose'.

'Whose' is used for possession for both people and objects.

For example, if we say:

This is the movie. I love the cast of this movie. And we want to put these two sentences together.

Our sentence is: This is the movie whose cast I love.

A very common question I get is:

Can we use 'which' instead of 'whose'.

Yes! You can. But, then you would have to bring in the

preposition 'of' and the article 'the' into your sentence.

And you end up with:

This is the movie of which the cast I love.

As you can hear, it's a bit complicated and it sounds very formal.

You can make it a bit less formal by switching the order of 'of' and 'that' and say:

This is the movie the cast of which I love.

That sounds a little better, but it's still very formal.

I'd recommend you always use 'whose'.

Whether you want to express a possession between people and objects or objects and objects.

Just stick with 'whose'.

Okay! So how about other prepositions than 'of'?

For example, let's say we're using the verb 'talk about'.

This is the movie about which I was talking.

Again, like the previous example, with 'of' it sounds very formal.

What we do here is that we take the preposition and put it at the end of the sentence.

This is the movie which I was talking about.

And when we do that, when we have removed the preposition from its place next to 'which',

we can also use 'that'. This is the movie that I was talking about.

Another common question I get is:

Can we drop the relative pronoun?

We cannot drop 'whose'. But we can drop 'that' or 'which'

in an essential clause when the information is about the object of the sentence.

For example, in the sentence:

This is the movie which or that I was talking about.

'Movie' is the object of this sentence and we can drop 'which' or 'that'.

We can just say:

This is the movie I was talking about.

But, in the other example: This is the movie which or that won 11 Oscars in 1997.

Here, 'movie' is the subject of the sentence and in this case you must not drop 'which' or 'that'.

You cannot say: This is the movie won 11 Oscars.

You need to say: This is the movie which won 11 Oscars.

Or, this is the movie that won 11 Oscars.

And finally, another very common question is:

Is what a relative pronoun?

And the answer is... No!

It's a very common mistake to use it as a relative pronoun instead of 'which' or 'that'.

For example, I often hear:

This is the movie what I was talking about.

'What' includes the idea of the noun and the relative pronoun.

So for example, instead of the movie which or the movie that, you can just say 'what'.

For example, if you're looking at the screen and the movie is on, you can just point and say:

This is what I was talking about.

Okay! That brings us to the end of this lesson.

If you want more information and exercises about relative clauses, you can watch this lesson.

Remember to check out my online course at Anglo-Link.com for lots of lessons and exercises about different topics.

And please don't forget to like, subscribe, and allow notifications.

Thanks a lot for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in my next lesson.

Goodbye for now.