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 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/