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RELATIVES DEFINING AND NON-DEFINING

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limitation themselves, they make more clear a limitation already given or implied; if, in fact, they are offered as alternative versions or as reminders. Our next example is of a defining clause of the same kind:

This estimate which he gives, is the great groundwork of his plan for the national redemption.—Burke.

The limitation given by 'this' is repeated in another form by the relative clause. 'This estimate, the one he gives, is...'

The reader should bear in mind that the distinction between the two kinds of relative is based entirely on the closeness of their relation to the antecedent. The information given by a defining clause must be taken at once, with the antecedent, or both are useless: that given by a non-defining clause will keep indefinitely, the clause being complete in sense without the antecedent, and the antecedent without the clause. This is the only safe test. To ask, for instance, whether the clause conveys comment, explanation, or the like, is not a sufficient test unless the question is rightly understood; for, although we have said that a non-defining clause conveys comment and the like, as opposed to definition of the antecedent, it does not follow that a defining clause may not (while defining its own antecedent) contribute towards comment; on the contrary, it is often open to a writer to throw his comment into such a form as will include a defining clause. It may even appear from a comparison of the two sentences below that this is the origin of the non-defining clause, (2) being an abbreviation of (1):

1. Lewis, a man to whom hard work never came amiss, sifted the question thoroughly.

2. Lewis, to whom hard work never came amiss, sifted the question...

In (1), a comment is introduced by 'a man' in apposition with Lewis; 'a man' is antecedent to a defining relative clause; separate them, and the antecedent is meaningless. But next remove the connecting words 'a man', and the relative changes at once its antecedent and its nature: the antecedent is