I think the Reduced Relative Clause analysis is a relic of early
Transformational Grammar, when linguists were enamored of the power of
transformations and hadn't het become sufficiently suspicious of such
formal power.  Transformations can, in fact, do anything you want them
do to, regardless of whether or not that thing is well supported by how
language works.  The delightfully named transformation Wh-is deletion
made it easy to posit a relative clause underlying any adjectival noun
modifier.  Combine that with adjective-shift to move a single word
adjective from post-nominal to pre-nominal position, and you had
tremendous power tied up in two simple transformations.  Of course,
transformations couldn't account for restrictions on order of
pre-nominal adjectives.  Nor could they account for the fact that there
were restrictions on the order of post-nominal modifiers as well, as in
"a student of linguistics from Chicago" vs. "a student from Chicago of
linguistics", while you could say either "a car parked by the side of
the road with red tires" or "a car with red tires parked by the side of
the road."  And then, of course, there were adjectives like "late" that
couldn't occur in the predicate of a relative clause, as in "the late
President Reagan" vs. "*President Reagan who was late."  The second
sentence works only with a temporal meaning, not the meaning that he's
dead.  

What Chomsky's work starting around 1968, followed by his own and other
work by his students, demonstrated was that for transformations to make
linguistically useful generalizations they had to be very tightly
constrained, and you couldn't create a transformation just because a
derivation made sense, like reducing all single-word and phrasal noun
modifiers from relative clauses.  Relative clause reduction was one of
these things that was justified only by simplicity, that it provided a
common source for nominal modifiers and so simplified the Phrase
Structure Rules.  That was a purely formal justification, something the
model could do and therefore did.  It was not motivated by actual
linguistic data.  The relative clause reduction analysis fell under its
own weight, since it could be motivated only formally and ran into
intractable problems with conflicting data.

Herb


Now, Janet and Kathleen, what are we to make of this?  Each of you  
asserts your view quite confidently.  I'm wondering if there is some  
test, some definition, that can lead one to recognize a "reduced  
relative clause" when one sees one.  Alternatively, what is to  
prevent us from simply declaring all post position adjectives as  
reduced relative clauses?  What do we gain by calling such  
constructions reduced relative clauses"  What do we lose if we, as I  
am inclined to do, simply call them adjectives?

Peter Adams

On Nov 18, 2007, at 5:31 PM, Castilleja, Janet wrote:

> Hi
>
> It is a reduced relative clause.  The pre-reduction sentence is
> 'A healthy meal which is available at many fast-food restaurants is  
> a salad with low-fat dressing.'  Reduced clauses of various types  
> are quite common.
>
> Janet Castilleja
> Heritage University
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of  
> Peter Adams
> Sent: Sat 11/17/2007 7:00 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Instruction versus learning
>
>
> I agree with Kathleen, but some of my colleagues are arguing that  
> it is a reduced relative clause. Does anyone agree with them?
>
> Peter
>
> On Nov 17, 2007, at 12:03 AM, Kathleen M. Ward wrote:
>
>
>     I think that it's just an adjective phrase, modified with a  
> prepositional phrase.  Adjective phrases that are postmodified  
> follow the noun rather than preceding it.  There are lots of examples.
>
>     Kathleen Ward
>     UC Davis
>
>     On Nov 16, 2007, at 8:52 PM, Peter Adams wrote:
>
>
>         Could someone help me analyze this sentence:
>
>
>
>         A healthy meal available at many fast-food restaurants is a  
> salad with low-fat dressing.
>
>
>         What is the underlined phrase?
>
>
>         Thanks.
>
>
>         Peter Adams
>
>
>
>
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