Relative Clauses in English and Turkish: A Contrastive Study

The study deals with relative clauses in English and Turkish. It states the formal characteristics and restrictive/non – restrictive relative clauses in these two languages. It aims at showing the similarities and differences at some points in relative clauses between English and Turkish. It is hypothesized that there are differences in grammatical structures between these two languages in relative clauses. The study has arrived at the following conclusions: 1- In English, all relative clauses are finite while in Turkish most of them are non –finite and some of them are finite. 2- Relative clauses in English are determined by pronouns, whereas in Turkish they are suffixes. 3- In English, personal and non-personal pronouns are used in relative clauses, while in Turkish the same suffixes are used to refer to personal and non-personal.