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In this sentence:

Our professional designers produce high-quality custom logo designs that exhibit the image (that) our clients want to project.

I've added above (that) to the original sentence to denote the point of my concern.

I had guessed this sentence is the compound of two compartment, which are "Our professional designers produce high-quality custom logo designs that exhibit the image" and "our clients want to project (the image)".

Then I had concluded this merge falls into the case of a relative pronoun.

My question is:

  1. Does this omit the relative pronoun?

  2. If it does, is there any formal term that describes this grammatical phenomenon?

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4
  • Preliminary point: "that" is not a relative pronoun but a subordinator. Relatives without "that" or a wh relative pronoun are called 'bare relatives'. "That" can be freely omitted provided the relativised element is not subject of the relative clause.
    – BillJ
    Commented May 11, 2017 at 11:32
  • @BillJ What is the main characteristic difference between relative pronoun and subordinator?
    – Beverlie
    Commented May 11, 2017 at 13:09
  • A relative pronoun like "who", "which" etc., is anaphorically linked to an antecedent expression -- it has a meaning which is provided by the antecedent. But subordinators like "that" are not anaphoric, they are meaningless lexemes serving simply to introduce a clause. I do realise that many people call relative that a relative pronoun, but many grammarians now accept that it behave like a subordinator and hence belongs in that class.
    – BillJ
    Commented May 11, 2017 at 13:24
  • That can be a relative pronoun (The house that fell had been built badly), a demonstrative pronoun (That house was built badly), or a subordinating conjunction (He determined that the house had been built badly). Ignore BillJ.
    – Khuldraeseth na'Barya
    Commented Jun 24, 2017 at 20:59

1 Answer 1

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Yes, there is a name for this. A relative clause in which the relative pronoun has been omitted is called a reduced relative clause.

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6
  • Non-wh relatives without the subordinator "that" are called 'bare' relatives. A reduced relative clause is one where the relativised element is deleted and the finite relative clause is replaced by a non-finite clause, for example, Students who live on campus will be disadvantaged. vs Students living on campus will be disadvantaged.
    – BillJ
    Commented May 11, 2017 at 12:26
  • Nope. That second example is a participial phrase, not a reduced relative clause.
    – Khuldraeseth na'Barya
    Commented May 11, 2017 at 12:33
  • Wake up! It's a clause. We stopped calling such expressions 'phrases' over twenty years ago.
    – BillJ
    Commented May 11, 2017 at 12:35
  • About when you stopped using "whom"? When you decided that "him and I" is always correct? That is certainly a phrase!
    – Khuldraeseth na'Barya
    Commented May 11, 2017 at 12:37
  • 1
    As it happens, I very much dislike the term 'reduced relative clause', since it's an obvious misnomer, and I never use it myself. In my second example, the noun "students" is modified by the gerund-participle clause living on campus will be seriously disadvantaged.
    – BillJ
    Commented May 11, 2017 at 12:43

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