57e Use adjective clauses appropriately.

An adjective clause provides more information about a preceding noun.

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The subject is a noun phrase in which the noun company is modified by the article the and the adjective clause Yossi’s uncle invested in. The sentence as a whole says that a certain company went bankrupt, and the adjective clause identifies the company more specifically by saying that Yossi’s uncle had invested in it.

One way of seeing how the adjective clause fits into the sentence is to rewrite it like this: The company (Yossi’s uncle had invested in it) went bankrupt. This is not a normal English sentence, but it helps demonstrate a process that leads to the sentence we started with. Note the following steps:

  1. Change the personal pronoun it to the relative pronoun which: The company (Yossi’s uncle had invested in which) went bankrupt.
  2. Either move the whole prepositional phrase in which to the beginning of the adjective clause, or move just the relative pronoun: The company in which Yossi’s uncle had invested went bankrupt or The company which Yossi’s uncle had invested in went bankrupt. While both of these are correct English sentences, the first version is somewhat more formal than the second.
  3. If no preposition precedes the relative pronoun, substitute that for which, or omit the relative pronoun entirely: The company that Yossi’s uncle had invested in went bankrupt or The company Yossi’s uncle had invested in went bankrupt. Both of these are correct English sentences. While they are less formal than the forms in step 2, they are still acceptable in much formal writing.