Talk:Reduced relative clause

"The horse raced past the barn fell"

"The horse raced past the barn fell" may be famous, but to anyone familiar with the North-West of England it is confusing: I for one read it as meaning "the horse [ran fast] past the [mountain associated with the barn]! Deipnosophista (talk) 10:56, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

This is a good point; however, not one that the scholars would have been aware of (probably). Surely, the main point is that the sentence is gibberish, as indeed is this article. If a listener/reader has to reread/reanalyse a sentence (and this cannot be done with ease if at all in a conversation) in order to understand its meaning - and even then the meaning is unclear as the post above shows - then there is something wrong with the sentence. This would seem to be a clear example of something which is theoretically syntactically possible, but which is communicatively impossible. "The horse racing past the barn fell" or "The horse raced by its trainer past the barn fell" or in journalese (possibly) "The horse, raced past the barn, fell". Nedzhik (talk) 10:06, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Chinese

Why exactly is there a section on Chinese here? Especially if it doesn't even have reduced relative clauses. Some Chinese supporter must be adding stuff to these articles for no reason.

I put it there in the beginning, with the hope that other people would add further sections on other languages. So far, that has not happened. Anyone is free to BOLDly remove it. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 03:55, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

I'm going to blank it. There's large variations between languages and it's probably better to mention only those (if any) that have something close to this specific structure rather than "oh, they don't do that because they don't need to". --49.132.194.11 (talk) 05:52, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

There's a contradiction between this article and the article complementizer. This article says that Chinese Mandarin de is a complementizer, which if correct would mean that Chinese does not have reduced relative clauses (and thus this discussion of Chinese should not be in this article). In contrast, the article complementizer says "Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese do not have complementizers at all.", implying that they do have reduced relative clauses.

The standard source Li and Yorke [correction: Li and Thompson], chapter 20, does not call de a complementizer -- it calls it a nominalizer. And it seems to me that it's hard to justify calling it a complementizer, since it does not serve as "syntactic head of a full clause", as the article complementizer puts it.

So I'm going to correct the section on Chinese to clarify that Chinese does indeed have reduced relative clauses. Duoduoduo (talk) 14:18, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

I've made the change I indicated above, under the assumption that Mandarin de cannot be called a complementizer. But I invite further discussion about this assumption. There seem to be various conflicting pieces of information about this:

• Li and Yorke [correction: Li and Thompson] never use the word "complementizer" in discussing de.
• The article complementizer says "a complementizer (or complementiser) is a syntactic category (part of speech) roughly equivalent to the term subordinating conjunction in traditional grammar. For example, the word that is generally called a complementizer in English sentences like Mary believes that it is raining."

According to this, and contrary to the lede of the present article, no relative clause has a complementizer, since relative clauses don't have subordinating conjunctions but instead have relative pronouns. If complementizers really are subordinating conjunctions, then maybe in the lede of the present article we should replace the word complementizer with the term relative pronoun.

• The article complementizer also says "Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese do not have complementizers at all."
• The article relative clause#Strategies for joining the relative clause to the main clause says "The following are some of the common strategies for joining the two clauses [relative clause and main clause]: Use of an indeclinable particle (a complementizer) inserted into the sentence....for example, in English with the word that ("the main that I saw")"

According to this, a complementizer is "an indeclinable particle", implying that Mandarin de is a complementizer (and implying that in English all the relative pronouns are complementizers with the exception of who/whom/whose, which is declinable).

So: is a complementizer a subordinating conjunction, an indeclinable particle, or any word that serves to link a main clause and a subordinate or relative clause? Duoduoduo (talk) 16:00, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

I don't know what you mean by "the standard source Li and Yorke". Are you referring to Li & Thompson?

As for whether or not 的 is a complementizer, in the case of relative clauses the short answer is yes. See articles such as the following:

• Cheng, Lisa Lai-shen (1986). "de in Mandarin." Canadian Journal of Linguistics 31(4): 313–326.
• Hsu, Natalie (2006). Issues in head-final relative clauses in Chinese: Derivation, processing, and acquisition. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Delaware.
• [1]

The claim in the Wikipedia article complementizer is presumably referring to a different sort of sentence. Mandarin doesn't have complementizers in sentences like "I think [that he will go to the store]", which do not include relative clauses. In relative clauses 的 functions like a complementizer, although of course people can argue about the specific differences between complementizers and nominalizers. This issue is largely irrelevant to the topic at hand. Regardless of whether you choose to call "that" and "的" complementizers or nominalizers, we are still talking about the same thing. rʨanaɢ (talk) 18:48, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

Whoops, Li and Thompson it is. (Li and Yorke is a seminal math article that I must have had on my mind subconsciously, even as I was holding Li and Thompson in my hands.)

Okay, a reduced relative clause has no linking word of any type, and such a linking word can always be called a complementizer. So the definition in the lede of complementizer needs to be broadened beyond subordinating conjunctions. I'll see what I can do with it.

I'm not sure that the new paragraph in the lede here really needs to be here -- it's not about reduced relative clauses, so it seems more appropriate for the article garden path sentence. Duoduoduo (talk) 19:28, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

The definition needs to be corrected

A reduced relative clause not only drops the relative pronoun or "that" but will also have a non-finite verb. Vineet Chaitanya (talk) 05:43, 7 November 2009 (UTC)Vineet Chaitanya

Garden Paths

There's already a rather nice article on Garden path sentences, but almost half of this article deals with the same thing in a different way. We should probably move the material on Garden pathing out of this article beyond a sentence or two and refer to that article. Volunteers or objections? --49.132.194.11 (talk) 05:55, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

Related: the sentence in the lead beginning, "Reduced relative clauses are given to ambiguity or garden path effects…" is itself a good example of the garden path effect. I am a native English speaker, reasonably well-educated, but it took me several seconds to parse it correctly. What was throwing me was the, "given to". I found myself asking how either ambiguity or garden path effects could be the recipient of a reduced relative clause! I wonder if replacing "given" with "prone" might not be clearer? Sleety Dribble (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 14:26, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

Any other languages besides English?

The article gives no examples of languages other than English that have reduced relative clauses. But there must be some, since at one point the article says

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.[10]

with reference [10] being

Townsend, David J; Thomas G Bever (2001). Sentence Comprehension: The Integration of Habits and Rules. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Could someone who has access to this source put in some other languages as examples? Duoduoduo (talk) 16:39, 11 October 2011 (UTC)