I came across the following ugly sentence in The Times (on 9 June 2026, example 1, emphasis added):
(1) The money is about double that which was paid to referees at the 2014 World Cup.
The sentence is grammatically fine, but sounds very stilted. Much better is example 2:
(2) The money is about double what was paid to referees at the 2014 World Cup.
Relative pronouns and their antecedents
In the sentence that appeared in The Times:
- which is a relative pronoun, marking (in this instance) the object of the embedded clause which was paid to referees at the 2014 World Cup
- that is the antecedent of the relative pronoun. In normal relative clauses, the relative pronoun depends on the antecedent and cannot appear without an appropriate antecedent.
Free relative clauses
Example 2 contains what is sometimes called a ‘free relative’ (or ‘fused relative’) clause. In it, the relative pronoun (what) plays 2 roles: it serves as both:
- a relative pronoun, object of the embedded clause what was paid to referees at the 2014 World Cup
- the antecedent of the relative pronoun, as part of the main clause The money is about double what.
The names ‘free relative’ and ‘fused relative’ reflect the fact that there is no separate antecedent. Depending on the particular syntactic analysis used, the relative pronoun might be viewed either:
– as free (not depending on the presence of an antecedent at all); or
– as fused with an antecedent that does not surface separately.
McCawley (1998) might analyse example 2 as a pseudo-relative, something similar to a relative but slightly different. I do not make that distinction in this post because it does not affect my main point.
Relative or free relative
Published example 1 contains a (normal, full) relative clause. It is perfectly grammatical, but sounds very stilted, old-fashioned and pedantic. Some writers would be happy to write it (or even say), particularly in a formal context.
Others (including me) would never (or almost never) write or say example 1.
Other languages
Full relative clauses such as example 1 sound very stilted in modern English. They are much more common (and sound much more natural) in some other languages, including German, Russian, and Hungarian. I will write about relative clauses in other languages in future posts.
Further Reading
A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar, Rodney Huddlestone and Geoffrey G Pullum ( 2nd edition, 2021)
The Syntactic Phenomena of English, James D McCawley (2nd edition, 1998)