Relative pronoun/conjuction

Loving her discouraged









In the HEART AND SOUL column of a popular national English daily, readers write in for advice of personal problems.

The following paragraph appears in one such letter written by a female student in her final year at university asking for guidance to solve her predicament of being unable to get over her feelings for a girl who has rejected the student's advances for a relationship.

The paragraph which has in one sentence an omission of "me" added in brackets states, "Two years ago, I told you that I was in love with my best friend, a girl, which made (me) feel like a lesbian. She went abroad to study and I couldn't get over her."

Any reader will have a doubt that what made the writer feel like a lesbian - the writer being in love with her best friend or her best friend, the girl. If it is the latter, the relative pronoun "which" used therein should have been "who"; and if otherwise, that particular sentence would have to be re-written as "Two years ago, I told you that I was in love with my best friend, a girl, and that that made (me) feel like a lesbian."

You will notice that the re-written sentence has three "that's". The first and the second ones are each a conjunction used to introduce a subordinate clause as object of the principal verb (told) as the necessary complement to a statement made. The third one is a pronoun used to indicate a state or event mentioned before.