Beth,

Try to replace that in both sentences with which.

That will always identify relative clause.

Bob Yates, Central Missouri State University

Beth Young wrote:

>I discovered today that my students are having trouble distinguishing
>between appositives and relative clauses, and I didn't have any clever
>explanation ready to hand.
>
>Here are a couple of example sentences with the suspected appositives
>in brackets:
>
>1. The book, [that was titled 'Great Expectations',] was a classic.
>
>2. The fact [that they didn't like chocolate] surprised her.
>
>I explained that appositives are completely interchangeable with the
>noun they are renaming, so that you could have all of the following
>permutations:
>
>A, B, was a classic.
>B, A, was a classic.
>A was a classic.
>B was a classic.
>
>That explanation cleared up sentence 1.  But when we got to sentence 2,
>the students interpreted "That they didn't like chocolate" as a nominal
>clause and felt that the interchangeable-ness worked.
>
>I wanted a way to explain the difference that didn't rely on pitting my
>grammatical sense against theirs.  I pointed out that there were no
>commas in sentence 2; they replied, "But what if we put commas in--does
>that make it an appositive"?  And of course they will find
>nonrestrictive relative clauses set off with commas, and who knows,
>perhaps some of those relative clauses might work as nominal clauses
>too.
>
>I told them that nouns and appositives were usually parallel in form,
>and that if they COULD interpret something as a relative clause, they
>SHOULD.  I don't think they were terribly enthusiastic about that
>explanation.
>
>Am I missing something obvious in my mid-semester tiredness?  How do
>you explain the difference?
>
>Beth
>
>
>
>
>Beth Rapp Young
>http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~byoung
>
>University of Central Florida
>>From Promise to Prominence: Celebrating 40 Years.
>
>
>

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