Janet,

It strikes me that there are three *different* reasons why one might or
might not want to view structures like "walking down the street" in "The
man walking down the street" as a reduced/elliptical form of "who is
walking down the street." Two you've alluded to already -- the idea that
one could adopt a position based on its pedagogical utility, and the
idea that the relationship might represent a "psychologically real"
process of reduction. 

"Psychological reality" is the kind of thing that (in principle, and
given some operational definitions) is open to empirical testing, as
long as it is assumed that the process itself takes some measurable
amount of time, or that the "unsaid" elements can trigger some kind of
observable change, such as occurs with semantic priming. There's a body
of cognitive psych experiments from the 60s and 70s that explored the
extent to which particular transformations (as "real" processes) were
supported by evidence or not. If memory serves (with stress on *if*),
the evidence was mixed and depended on the particular transformation --
adding a negative does take time, but "aux-hopping" doesn't, etc. I
don't remember any studies of these reduced clauses, but they might
exist. After these kinds of studies, Chomsky said (I think) that he
viewed transformations as relationships rather than real-time processes,
but that's not to say that no one could treat some of them as such. 

The third issue has to do with what role the analyst wants ellipsis or
"zero elements" to play, and debates about that are much harder to
resolve. I tend to be intensely, perhaps unreasonably, suspicious of
zero elements, so try to opt for whatever analysis of a structure best
avoids them, if I can do so without ending up with something awful.
Thus, I *don't* treat "walking down the street" as "(who) (is) walking
down the street" -- and I don't treat noun to verb shifts as involving a
zero derivational suffix, and (in my own work, rather than classroom
materials) I don't even treat imperatives as having an "understood you"
as a subject. I'd have a very hard time proving that the opposing
positions are wrong, though -- it's more a matter of adopting one
possible position and trying to stay consistent. All analysts have to
set limits on ellipsis somewhere, or they end up with the possibility
that every sentence has a silent repetition of the Gettysburg Address in
it, but there are a number of points at which the "filter" can be
reasonably set.

Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University

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