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 > > > > > = To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the > list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ > ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" > > Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org <http://ateg.org/> / > > > To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's > web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and > select "Join or leave the list" > > Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org <http://ateg.org/> / > > > = To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web > interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and > select "Join or leave the list" > > Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ > > To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web > interface at: > http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html > and select "Join or leave the list" > > Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/