Are there any differences between the following sentences?
- People who live on their own are often feeling lonely.
- People living on their own are often feeling lonely.
Other examples:
- Those who go to the gym many times a week feel invigorated at work.
- Those going to the gym many times a week feel invigorated at work.
Best Answer
Syntactically, both bracketed clauses modify "people". The difference is that in [1] it's a relative clause, in [2] a gerund-participial clause.
Semantically, they are very similar and there's little to choose between them, though statistics show that [2] is more common than [1].
The same applies syntactically to your other two examples, though semantically it's the relative clause that is the more common.