The never-ending…. relative clause!!

As you have been told in previous lessons, the use of relative clauses helps to clarify the meaning of some sentences, but you have to be aware that an excessive use of relative clauses is ineffective. To prove this, you were asked to come up with a sentence including the maximum number of relative clauses, defining or non-defining. These are some of the results. As you will see, it is quite hard to follow them, they are just too long and provide too much information. 

Ms. Ros & Ms. Lamb:

-          When we went to the beach we saw a woman who was swimming in the sea with a pink swimsuit that she had had for a year and her brother, who had given her the pink swimsuit she was wearing, was buying a towel because he didn’t have one as his sister, who was selfish, wouldn’t share the one that she had with him.

Mr. Cerdó:

-           I had a cousin whose half-step sister worked in a house which was located in the middle of the city whose owner was very rich and had more than ten cars which were all Porsche that could reach the three hundred km per hour and the guy who drove them was always stressed because he was the one who had to buy spare parts for them and had to pay everything with his own money which made him a little bit scared at the beginning but the guy who had the job before him gave him some advice which was very useful and told him where to go to buy the spare parts that he might need.

Ms. García & Ms. Van:

-          Elena, whose sister lives in England, was born in Saint Louis hospital which has recently been shut down, which makes her really sad and her mum, who lives with her younger brother, who has a mental illness which prevents them from being able to visit her sister, is trying to cheer her up, but none of this is having any result on Elena.