1: This is the house where my father lived for thirty years.
2: This is the house that my father lived for thirty years.
3: This is the house my father lived for thirty years.
Does the above three sentences sound natural?
Thank you in advance!
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Sign up to join this communityTo answer your question, only sentence 1 sounds natural.
Now, to explain further:
This is the house where my father lived for thirty years.
This sentence is correct because you have used where to describe the location of a place (ie. the house).
Coming to sentence 2:
This is the house that my father lived for thirty years.
Here, "that" is used to describe the house directly, and not the location of the place where your father lived. Since, you live "in" a house; so, to frame sentence 2 correctly, you can use:
This is the house that my father lived in for thirty years.
And lastly, sentence 3:
This is the house my father lived for thirty years.
This sentence is almost the same as the original sentence 2 with the exception that "that" is omitted out, as it can implicitly refer to "house". With the same reasoning as used for sentence 2, you would need to use "in" for sentence 3:
This is the house my father lived in for thirty years.