English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
'Christmas is a time when there are many parties'.
Why can't we omit 'when' in this sentence?
It appears in a grammar book for students of English, and although 'when' can be omitted if the relative clause has its own subject, it doesn't seem to be possible here. Is it because of the verb 'there are'?
Could you give a grammatical explanation?
Christmas is a time (when) there are many parties.
The relative clause has its own subject, "there", so there is no grammatical reason why you cannot drop "when" to give a 'bare' relative.
Admittedly, some people feel uncomfortable dropping "when". This is probably motivated by the fact that the subject of the relative clause is the dummy pronoun "there". Compare the (perhaps) more acceptable:
Christmas is a time many people hold festive parties.
Generally, when is not a conjunction that can be omitted, as is common with who, which or that. Perhaps that's where you're getting the idea.
Here's an example using that, which shows the rule about the relative clause having a subject. We can say all of these:
The water that I drank was cold.
The water I drank was cold.
I drank the water that was cold.
But we can't say this:
I drank the water was cold.
This is because the meaning of the first sentence is clear without that, due to the presence of the subject I. It isn't clear with the third sentence if you leave out that.
For a very nice complete explanation from our sister site english.stackexchange.com, see this.
