Which which


A great example of what me some others (okay, just one other) are calling the Japanese-style relative clause in English can be found in the script for Serenity. After watching a video showing River being given given a key phrase, which causes her to pass out (after having beaten up the male population of an entire bar), Mr. Universe remarks,

Mr. Universe: And, she falls asleep. Which, she would be sleepy.

Called “Japanese-style” because there is no necessary grammatical gap in the relative clause that could correspond to the modified head (which in this case is probably just the previous sentence). There is of course a semantic and/or pragmatic (i.e., discourse/text-cohesive) relation between the two clauses.

2 Comments so far

  1. Your Linguistic Girlfriend on April 19th, 2007

    Isn’t it such a great movie?! sigh I think we’ll have to watch it a couple more times, just so you can look for more “Japanese- Style” relative clauses. I am willing to make that sacrifice for you. (No need to thank me)

  2. The Ridger on April 20th, 2007

    The movie’s loaded with them – as when Mal says “She meant to kill me until the doc put her out, which how does that work?” I’m pretty sure they did it in Firefly, too, though having just rewatched Serenity a few days ago the quotes from that movie are in my recollection while it’s been a few months since I watched Firefly and I can’t remember any for sure.