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Philip Newton
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Date: Thursday, 16 June 2005 04:27 (UTC)That's debatable. In my 'lect, "The man I saw yesterday" and "The man whom I saw yesterday" are both correct; the first version is not "missing" a relative pronoun.
This sometimes causes problems for English speakers learning another language, such as German, where such relative pronouns are not optional. But I'd say that in English, they usually are: they can be included or left out at the desire of the speaker.
I suppose one big reason this works in English is very little use of inflection (so, for example, imperfects and passive participles can look the same, and nouns and verbs can be identical [which is what gives "Time flies like a banana" three interpretations, with any of the first three words able to be the main verb]). Though the fact that you can leave out small words such as relative pronouns and auxiliary verbs (e.g. in the passive) also helps.