Learn English – relative clause inside another relative clause

relative-clauses

So if you're making a game that a person who plays Limbo might like, you should….

I heard this in one of the videos by Totalbiscuit. He's a game commentator on youtube. I'm pretty sure the guy is from Newcastle. Just in case if it matters. Limbo is a video game.

My question is, is it ok to have a relative clause inside another relative clause?

Best Answer

There is no grammatical rule against attaching relative clauses to other relative clauses in English.

In a highly inflected language like classical Latin, it is possible to insert a seemingly indefinite number of clauses to others, as anyone who has been assigned to translate a page-long sentence of Cicero knows. But English is weakly inflected, and highly dependent on syntactic markers like word position and proximity to deliver meaning. The more dependent clauses you add to a sentence, the more awkward it sounds and the more difficult it becomes to parse, whether in spoken or written English, so there are practical limits to how many levels of recursion your reader will tolerate.

Marcel Proust is infamous for some long sentences, which have been the subject of competitions and even artwork.

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