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I struggle with how pronouns are used in English sentences. I want to give an example of a sentence I have trouble comprehending. This sentence below comes from documentation read by software engineers:

The lifecycle of the kubeadm CLI tool is decoupled from the kubelet, which is a daemon that runs on each node within the Kubernetes cluster.

  1. I do not understand what the word "which" is referring too. Is the word "which" referring to the "kubeadm CLI tool" or is the word "which" referring to the "kubelet"?

  2. What procedure did you use to help you answer Question 1?

  3. Is the procedure you defined in Question 2 a strict rule followed by native English speakers?

  4. What level of English proficiency is normally required before someone is familiar with the procedure that you defined in Question 2?

  5. Would it have been more beneficial to rewrite the original sentence as two sentences and without the use of the word "which"? For example:

    The lifecycle of the kubeadm CLI tool is decoupled from the kubelet. The kubeadm CLI tool is a daemon that runs on each node within the Kubernetes cluster.

Note: replace the phrase in bold with that actual answer you provided in question 2

I think my two sentences convey the same meaning as the original message without any ambiguity. However, my approach comes at the cost of 6 additional ASCII characters. Avoiding the use of pronouns can improve comprehension among non-native English readers/speakers. Are there substantial drawbacks to my two sentence approach?

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    You have correctly identified the word which refers to. Many languages use "that/which/who" to refer right back to the last noun.
    – Yosef Baskin
    Commented Dec 1 at 3:37
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    It seems to me the kubelet is the daemon. “ Since the kubelet is a daemon, it needs to be maintained by some kind of an init system or service manager. ”
    – Xanne
    Commented Dec 1 at 7:28
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    You don't need to know English relative pronouns rules to see that "the kubeadm CLI tool" is a CLI tool, so it cannot be also a daemon. (One is a program you interact with, the other is a program that runs quietly in the background.) Thus leaving "kubelet" as the only candidate.
    – walen
    Commented Dec 2 at 9:35
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    It looks as if the author inserted the phrase "which is a daemon..." to explain something that had not already been explained. Seeing as the sentence you quote is talking not about the tool but about its lifecycle, I guess that the manual has already explained what the tool is. Is that right? Has the manual already explained what the kubelet is?
    – Rosie F
    Commented Dec 2 at 10:14
  • rosieF- it may have, the documentation is very extensive and the subject matter is very new to me. So I need to re-read this documentation again. walen - yes that makes sense in this case. But I also have other engineers who write&say things like "The system use modules, which is expensive". Is "which" referring the system, the module or the "fact" that a "system uses module". And I can not consistently guess what "which" refers to. This has led to a lot of mistakes in my work. I need to improve my english.
    – learningtech
    Commented Dec 2 at 14:52

2 Answers 2

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As a native speaker who knows nothing at all about the topic of the sentence, I would understand that:

  1. 'Which' refers to the kubelet (the noun immediately before it).

  2. A lifetime of hearing and reading English sentences.

  3. I think most English speakers would understand it that way.

  4. I'm not familiar with formal 'levels of proficiency', but I would say a reasonable familiarity with idiomatic English.

  5. No, it would not be 'more beneficial'. To say The kubelet is a daemon... would look like an unnecessary repetition to a native speaker.

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    +1 But it would be more efficient to say " ... the kubelet, a daemon that runs ..."
    – TimR
    Commented Dec 1 at 11:27
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    I disagree with your 5. Reading technical books, understanding them, and memorising them is hard. Repetition always helps. Pronouns never help. Figuring out which word a pronoun refers to is trivial in isolation, but in a technical book it's a "trivial difficulty" which piles up with all the other difficulties, and which avoids a useful repetition, making it harder to remember and assimilate what the learner is reading.
    – Stef
    Commented Dec 1 at 20:32
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    @Stef especially as such documentation tends to run-on sentences; these make the problem less trivial than in the example here. However I would only use the version which repeats "kubelet" if I was going on to discuss it. In other cases I might even go the other way: "The lifecycle of the kubeadm CLI tool is decoupled from the kubelet (a daemon that runs on each node within the Kubernetes cluster)" to signal the lower importance of the definition of "kubelet" if the discussion continues to be about kubeadm.
    – Chris H
    Commented Dec 2 at 14:30
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As commented, the relative pronoun which has antecedent kubelet. The antecedent is usually the nearest previous noun but may be the entire previous clause in some cases. We interpret these from context.

Splitting sentences into two isn't a good solution as it makes passages more wordy. Here we would need to repeat the kubelet, as shown in the OP’s version.

Besides making writing more concise, relative clauses let writers place focus on something or someone, as shown in this example from Cambridge Dictionary.

I was talking about the woman.

She’s the woman who I was talking about.

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    Instruction manuals and operating procedures are one genre of writing where the most concise option is not necessarily preferred. Sometimes it's better to be verbose when failure to understand could be dangerous or costly, and where you can't guarantee language proficiency of the reader.
    – Bryan Krause
    Commented Dec 1 at 19:14
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    @BryanKrause the best example of that is an SNL sketch about a senior engineer at a nuclear reactor who gives an ambiguous instruction just before he retires: "You can't put too much water in the coolant tank."
    – Barmar
    Commented Dec 2 at 5:06

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