The function of the embedded clause is to restrict the possible set of student, papers, films and so on to just the subset that the speaker wants to talk about (5). For example, in (50a) I didn’t just meet the student, I met a specific subset of students-only the ones who hadn’t read the book. Relative clauses in other languages may look very different syntactically to the English examples in (50). But they all have in common this property of restricting the set of possible items that the head noun refers to.Cross-linguistically, relative clauses often have other typical features too, as we’ll see.