Reduced relative clause

A reduced relative clause is a relative clause that is not marked by an overt complementizer (such as that). Reduced relative clauses often give rise to ambiguity or garden path effects, and have been a common topic of psycholinguistic study, especially in the field of sentence processing.

Description

Relative clauses are a special class of dependent clause (also called "subordinate clause"),^[1] that serve to modify a noun.^[2][3] In English and some related languages, relative clauses are often introduced by a relative pronoun—a wh- word such as "who", "where", etc.—or by that.^[1]

Reduced relative clauses, on the other hand, have no relative pronoun or that introducing them.^[4] The example below contrasts an English relative clause and reduced relative clause.

In English

In English, the similarity between the active past tense form of verbs (i.e., "John kicked the ball") and the passive past tense (i.e., "the ball was kicked") gives rise to a special form of reduced relative clause, called the reduced object relative passive clause^[5] (so called because the noun being modified is the direct object 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.^[5][6][7]

In sentences such as this, when the reader or hearer encounters the verb, 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 [who was] sent the flowers was very pleased" (in which "sent" is the beginning of a reduced relative clause).^[4] 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.^[8] 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, 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.^[9]

In other languages

Please help improve this section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page. (March 2009)

Chinese

Chinese differs from English in that relative clauses generally precede the noun they are modifying, and the complementizer (的, pinyin de, comparable to English that) comes at the end of the relative clause rather than at the beginning; furthermore, Chinese does not use relative pronouns, but only uses the complementizer 的.^[6][10] The complementizer cannot be omitted, so there is no "reduction" comparable to the reduction in English sentences like "the horse raced past the barn fell"; relative clauses in Chinese can still give rise to temporary ambiguity, however, and have been the subject of psycholinguistic experiments similar to those conducted in English.^[6]

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.^[9] Therefore, reduced relative clauses have been the subject of "an enormous number of experiments"^[5] in psycholinguistics, especially for investigating whether semantic information or information from the context 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...[by 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...[by the lawyer]", where the subject "evidence" is not animate and thus could not be doing the examining).^[11] Reduced relative clauses have also been used in studies of second language acquisition, to compare how native speakers handled reduced relatives and how non-native speakers handle them.^[12]

See also

• Asyndeton, series of related clauses without conjunctions

Notes

Bibliography

• Carrol, David W (2008). Psychology of Language (5 ed.). Belmont: Thomson & Wadsworth. 
• Li, Charles N; Sandra A Thompson (1981). Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar. Los Angeles: University of California Press. 
• Townsend, David J; Thomas G Bever (2001). Sentence Comprehension: The Integration of Habits and Rules. Cambridge: MIT Press.