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I am learning Japanese and right now focusing on clauses. Shortly speaking, I need to know the English terminologies for some clauses below such that I can find their counterparts in Japanese easily.

The clauses are intentionally surrounded by braces for the sake of emphasizing them.

# Case 1:

The clause modifies a noun that does an action.

The man (who killed his wife yesterday) has been arrested this morning. His name is John Smith.

# Case 2:

The clause modifies a noun that gets an action from another agent.

The name of a woman (who John Smith killed yesterday) is Mary Smith.

# Case 3:

The clause modifies a noun but it differs from case 1 and case 2.

Everybody in this town knows the news (that John Smith killed his wife).

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Cases 1 and 2 are both called relative clauses. Case 3 is an appositive clause. See this web page.

The difference between cases 1 and 2 is that in case 1, the pronoun who is the subject of the clause, while in case 2, the pronoun who is the object of the clause (so traditionally whom should be used, although today who is very often used instead).

There doesn't seem to be a term that distinguishes between cases 1 and 2 that is widely used in English grammar. For example, the web page linked above distinguishes between cases where the pronoun is the subject and the object, but doesn't give any actual terms for these cases.

If you're talking about German grammar, case 1 would be a nominative relative clause, and case 2 would be an accusative relative clause. See this web page, for example. German also has dative and genitive relative clauses. Dative relative clauses don't really exist in English, and genitive relative clauses usually start with whose.

Tom Jones (whose gun was the murder weapon) refused to talk to investigators.

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  • In my view an apposition is a noun, but I know , of course, that English grammar terms often are something special.
    – rogermue
    Commented Jun 25, 2015 at 12:47
  • @rogermue: if you consider "that John Smith killed his wife" to be a noun clause, then you have two noun clauses next to each other, both describing the same thing. That's the definition of apposition. And "that John Smith killed his wife" certainly can be a noun clause: "that John Smith had killed his wife was something everybody knew but nobody ever mentioned."
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Jun 26, 2015 at 2:56
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.#1 and #2 are simple relative clauses, in English also often called adjective clauses, a term that not so optimal, because a relative clause is no adjective but an attribute.

As for #3, here the that-clause is an attribute to news, so it is an attributive clause. Such clauses occur after nouns such as fact, news, information and similar nouns.

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  • Do you have a reference for this terminology (attributive clause, not relative clause)? I thought all three of these examples were called "attributive clauses".
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Jun 25, 2015 at 12:25
  • Attribute is the general Latin term for things added to a noun. Adjective is normally a word class and not optimal for relative clauses. As reference see any Latin grammar or en.wikipedia attribute (grammar) .en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute -Of course, you can call all three clauses attributive clauses, though it is not very practical if you don't distinguish between "the man who ..." and "the fact + that-clause".
    – rogermue
    Commented Jun 25, 2015 at 13:01
  • if you distinguish between cases 1/2 and case 3 by calling cases 1 and 2 relative clauses and case 3 an attributive clause, but everybody else uses the term attributive clause for all three of these cases, that's not very practical, either.
    – Peter Shor
    Commented Jun 26, 2015 at 2:53

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