A reduced relative clause is a

relative clause A relative clause is a clause that modifies a noun or noun phrase and uses some grammatical device to indicate that one of the arguments in the relative clause refers to the noun or noun phrase. For example, in the sentence ''I met a man who wasn ...

that is not marked by an explicit

relative pronoun A relative pronoun is a pronoun that marks a relative clause. An example is the word ''which'' in the sentence "This is the house which Jack built." Here the relative pronoun ''which'' introduces the relative clause. The relative clause modifies th ...

relativizer In linguistics, a relativizer (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a type of Conjunction (grammar), conjunction that introduces a relative clause. For example, in English, the conjunction ''that'' may be considered a relativizer in a s ...

such as ''who'', ''which'' or ''that''. An example is the clause ''I saw'' in the English sentence "This is the man ''I saw''." Unreduced forms of this relative clause would be "This is the man ''that I saw''." or "...''whom I saw''." Another form of reduced relative clause is the "reduced object passive relative clause", a type of nonfinite clause headed by a

past participle In linguistics, a participle (; abbr. ) is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, ''participle'' has been defined as "a word derived from a verb and used as an adject ...

, such as the clause ''found here'' in: "The animals ''found here'' can be dangerous." Reduced relative clauses are given to

ambiguity Ambiguity is the type of meaning (linguistics), meaning in which a phrase, statement, or resolution is not explicitly defined, making for several interpretations; others describe it as a concept or statement that has no real reference. A com ...

or garden path effects, and have been a common topic of psycholinguistic study, especially in the field of

sentence processing Sentence processing takes place whenever a reader or listener processes a language utterance, either in isolation or in the context of a conversation or a text. Many studies of the human language comprehension process have focused on reading of ...

Finite types

Regular relative clauses are a class of

dependent clause A dependent clause, also known as a subordinate clause, subclause or embedded clause, is a certain type of clause that juxtaposes an independent clause within a complex sentence. For instance, in the sentence "I know Bette is a dolphin", the claus ...

(or "subordinate clause") that usually modifies a

noun In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, like living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an Object (grammar), object or Subject (grammar), subject within a p ...

.Li & Thompson 1981:579–580.Carrol 2008:294. They are typically introduced by one of the relative pronouns ''who'', ''whom'', ''whose'', ''what'', or ''which''and, in English, by the word ''that'', which may be analyzed either as a relative pronoun or as a

; see That as relativizer. Reduced relative clauses have no such relative pronoun or relativizer introducing them.Carrol 2008:136. The example below contrasts an English non-reduced relative clause and reduced relative clause. Because of the omission of

function word In linguistics, function words (also called functors) are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning and express grammatical relationships among other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speak ...

s, the use of reduced relative clauses, particularly when nested, can give rise to sentences which, while theoretically correct grammatically, are not readily parsed by listeners. A well-known example put forward by linguists is " Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo", which contains the reduced relative clause ''Buffalo buffalo buffalo'' (meaning "which buffalo from Buffalo (do) buffalo").

Non-finite types

In English, the similarity between the active

past tense The past tense is a grammatical tense whose function is to place an action or situation in the past. Examples of verbs in the past tense include the English verbs ''sang'', ''went'' and ''washed''. Most languages have a past tense, with some hav ...

form of verbs (i.e., "John ''kicked'' the ball") and the

passive Passive may refer to: * Passive voice, a grammatical voice common in many languages, see also Pseudopassive * Passive language, a language from which an interpreter works * Passivity (behavior), the condition of submitting to the influence of ...

past tense (i.e., "the ball was ''kicked''") can give rise to confusion concerning a special form of reduced relative clause, called the ''reduced object relative passive clause''Townsend & Bever 2001:247 (so called because the noun being modified is the

direct object In linguistics, an object is any of several types of arguments. In subject-prominent, nominative-accusative languages such as English, a transitive verb typically distinguishes between its subject and any of its objects, which can include but ...

of the relative clause, and the relative clause is in passive voice), the most famous example of which is

The horse raced past the barn fell.

In sentences such as this, when the reader or hearer encounters the verb (in this case, ''raced'') he or she can interpret it in two different ways: as a main verb, or the first verb of a reduced relative clause. Linguist David W. Carrol gives the example of "the florist sent...", which could either go on to form a sentence such as "the florist sent the flowers to the elderly widow" (in which "sent" is the main verb), or one such as "the florist ho wassent the flowers was very pleased" (in which "sent" is the beginning of a reduced relative clause). Sentences like this often produce a garden path effect—an effect whereby a reader begins a sentence with one interpretation, and later is forced to backtrack and re-analyze the sentence's structure.Carrol 2008:5. The diagram below illustrates the garden path effect in the sentence "the florist sent the flowers was pleased," where (1) represents the initial structure assigned to the sentence, (2) represents the garden path effect elicited when the reader encounters "was" and has nowhere to put it, and (3) represents the re-analysis of the sentence as containing a reduced relative clause. While reduced relative clauses are not the only structures that create garden path sentences in English ( other forms of garden path sentences include those caused by

lexical ambiguity Ambiguity is the type of meaning in which a phrase, statement, or resolution is not explicitly defined, making for several interpretations; others describe it as a concept or statement that has no real reference. A common aspect of ambiguit ...

, or words that can have more than one meaning), they are the "classic" example of garden path sentences, and have been the subject of the most research.

Criticism

Not all grammatical frameworks include reduced relative clauses. The term reduced relative clause comes from transformational

generative grammar Generative grammar is a research tradition in linguistics that aims to explain the cognitive basis of language by formulating and testing explicit models of humans' subconscious grammatical knowledge. Generative linguists, or generativists (), ...

, which assumes deep structures and surface structures in language. Frameworks that assume no underlying form label non-finite reduced relative clauses as participial phrases. * Students who are living on campus will receive a refund. (full relative clause) * Students living on campus will receive a refund. (participial phrase) * Bikes that are ridden to school must be left in the bicycle racks. (full relative clause) * Bikes ridden to school must be left in the bicycle racks. (participial phrase)

Use in psycholinguistic research

Across languages, reduced relative clauses often give rise to temporary ambiguity (garden path effects), since the first word of a reduced clause may initially be interpreted as part of the main clause.Townsend & Bever 2001:248. Therefore, reduced relative clauses have been the subject of "an enormous number of experiments" in psycholinguistics, especially for investigating whether

semantic Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...

information or information from the

context In semiotics, linguistics, sociology and anthropology, context refers to those objects or entities which surround a ''focal event'', in these disciplines typically a communicative event, of some kind. Context is "a frame that surrounds the event ...

can affect how a reader or listener initially parses a sentence. For example, one study compared sentences in which the garden path effect was more likely because the reduced relative verb was one that was likely to be used as a main verb for its subject (as in "the defendant examined... y the lawyer, where the subject "defendant" is animate and could be the do-er of the action) and sentences in which the garden path effect was less likely (as in "the evidence examined... y the lawyer, where the subject "evidence" is not animate and thus could not be doing the examining).Carrol 2008:137. Reduced relative clauses have also been used in studies of

second-language acquisition Second-language acquisition (SLA), sometimes called second-language learning—otherwise referred to as L2 (language 2) acquisition, is the process of learning a language other than one's native language (L1). SLA research examines how learners ...

, to compare how native speakers handled reduced relatives and how non-native speakers handle them. In languages with head-final relative clauses, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Turkish, non-reduced relative clauses may also cause temporary ambiguity because the relativizer does not precede the relative clause (and thus a person reading or hearing the relative clause has no "warning" that they are in a relative clause).See, e.g., Peng (1993), and Hsu, Natalie (2006). ''Issues in head-final relative clauses in Chinese: Derivation, processing, and acquisition.'' Ph.D. dissertation, University of Delaware.

Notes

Bibliography