The article I am about to review is titled “Performance Constraints on Relative Pronoun Deletion”.

It was
written by Thomas M. Cofer from University of Southern California, and mainly concerns relative
pronouns and circumstances, under which these pronouns can be omitted.

The article begins by introduction of the sentence “He’s the man (whom/who/that) I saw. The words in
parentheses are relative pronouns. The sentence has the same meaning no matter which of these
pronouns we use. Moreover, the author states that in oral speech it is possibly to completely omit a
pronoun.

The author refers to Jacobs and Rosenbaum to uncover the conditions, which are needed to omit a
relative pronoun. According to them who(m), that, and which can be deleted only when the pronoun
follows directly after the head noun phrase and precedes the subject noun phrase of the relative clause.

The author introduces to us professor Quirk, who has conducted a study on this topic and on some
adjacent ones. According to Quirk he counted 1300 relative clauses, of whish 1124 were restrictive. He
came to some conclusions. First of all, omission of the relative pronoun was very rare whin it was the
subject of its clause; only two cases occurred. Second of all, no ‘that’ or zero forms occurred in the
adjunct function when the preposition was initial in the clause. Finally, the average length in words of
object relative clauses varied according to the choice of relative pronoun. Zero-clauses were shortest,
with an average of four words each; that-clauses had an average of five words; and which-clauses had
an average of six.

The article is very informative. However, it is written quite scientifically. So, it would be hard for a
regular reader to understand everything without proper knowledge.

I personally found this article useful, though I had a difficulty understanding some parts of it, but I am
sure that readers, who are more educated than me, would appreciate the work.