The/My father who

Here's a quote from A Student's Introduction to English Grammar:

On the basis of this kind of contrast, the two types of relative clause are traditionally called ‘restrictive’ (or sometimes ‘defining’) and ‘non-restrictive’ (or ‘non-defining’), respectively. We don’t use these terms. They are misleading: the integrated relative is NOT always restrictive, in the sense of picking out a subset of the set denoted by the head noun.

Here’s another example, one that we found in a novel by Dick Francis, where the NP is definite rather than indefinite:

[12] [The father who had planned my life to the point of my unsought arrival in Brighton] took it for granted that in the last three weeks of his legal guardianship I would still act as he directed..

Again the relative clause does not distinguish one father from another: the narrator here is talking about the only father he ever had. So the information given in the relative clause is NOT semantically restrictive. It is integrated, though. The reason for expressing it in an integrated relative is that it has crucial relevance to the rest of the message: it was because the father had planned the narrator’s life hitherto that he assumed he would be able to continue to do so.

Here, can you replace The with My like this?

[My father who had planned my life to the point of my unsought arrival in Brighton] took it for granted that in the last three weeks of his legal guardianship I would still act as he directed..

It doesn't work for me. But if the information given in the relative clause is NOT semantically restrictive, why shouldn't My work?

The only reason I can think of that you cannot use My instead of The is that "My father" would only refer to the only father that the narrator has whereas "The father" does not.

Solution 1:

I won't find supporting references for this, but I'd label

• The father who had planned my life to the point of my unsought arrival in Brighton took it for granted that in the last three weeks of his legal guardianship I would still act as he directed..

a literary usage where a defining structure (cf 'The man who killed Liberty Valance') is used to vastly strengthen the rather weaker 'adjunct' 'My father, who had planned my life ...' implying that this is far from being tagged-on additional information. So syntactically classifiable as 'defining', but semantically not identifying a particular father(!) but emphasising the necessity of the clause, showing it's far from being '..., Oh, and by the way, he had planned my life ...').

Using 'my' instead of 'the' needs a comma on each side of the now non-defining (both syntactically and semantically) relative clause. Perfectly grammatical, but far weaker.

Solution 2:

The father who had planned my life to the point of my unsought arrival in Brighton took it for granted that ...

(i) In the above (the the version) "who had planned my life to the point of my unsought arrival in Brighton" is a defining relative clause.

The NP subject is "The father who had planned my life to the point of my unsought arrival in Brighton"

(ii) In the "my" version ", who had planned my life to the point of my unsought arrival in Brighton," it is a descriptive, or non-defining clause. (Note the commas)

The NP subject is "My father"

The effect of the defining clause (i) is to separate the types of father that the writer's father represents by specifying one of the features of the father that separate this aspect of his character from others.

Consider: "I had last seen John when he and I were 13 years old. He had been fat and shy. We were now 43 years old and the John who I had known then was not the John who I saw now - he was slim, confident and obviously rich."

My has an adjectival effect and also separates this father from all other fathers: he is the father of the writer. However, ", who had planned my life to the point of my unsought arrival in Brighton, is merely additional and extraneous information - it may be omitted.

If the "my" version were a defining clause,"My father who had planned my life to the point of my unsought arrival in Brighton", it would imply that the author had another, physical father who had not "planned his life, etc". (And this is quite impossible.)

Here, can you replace The with My like this?

No. The sentences mean different things.