But what about the home that you are leaving behind?'

Question

Hi everybody,I have a couple of questions.Would it be possible to use 'where' instead of 'that'? if not, where we can substitute 'relative adverbs' for 'relative pronoun'.I know that we are not allowed to use in every situation that we can use 'relative pronoun' use 'relative adverbs'.'The holiday season is here. This is a time when many of us plan to get away from it all. But what about the home that you are leaving behind?' Thanks in advanced.

BillJ · Accepted Answer

But what about the home that you are leaving ___ behind?'

No, you can't replace "that" with "where" in this example since they play quite different roles in the relative clause.

That is not a relative word; it's just a meaningless 'marker' that introduces relative (and other) clauses; it has no meaningful function like subject or object, for example. In your example, there is no relative word present in its grammatically logical position, so we represent it with the gap notation '____'; we understand that you are leaving some place called home behind.

Where, by contrast, has the meaningful function of 'adjunct of place', where it typically expresses the locative meaning 'in/at/to some place'; for example this is a place where you can really unwind means "you can really unwind in/at this place". But you can't apply that locative meaning to your example. You're not leaving in/at some home; you are simply leaving it behind.

But what about the home that you are leaving behind?'

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