No one has yet mentioned that the sentence has an error of omission--it should say "the lowest approval rating OF any second-term president" (not capitalized, btw--right?), shouldn't it?
 
Tim
 
Tim Hadley
Graduate Assistant, Graduate School Fellowships and Scholarships
Ph.D. candidate, Technical Communication and Rhetoric
Texas Tech University

________________________________

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Karl Hagen
Sent: Thu 5/12/2005 2:47 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Help with parsing



The relative clause is embedded inside the content clause, and 'who'
comes from the subject of the content clause. It's reasonably common for
the relative pronoun to originate inside an embedded clause like this.
Ignoring the modifiers of 'rating', a Reed-Kellogg would look something
like this (view in a fixed-font):


               (that)
               ------
                 .
                 .
           who | . has | rating
           ----+---------------
                 |
                 |
  polls | say | / \
-------+------------
        |

Karl Hagen
Department of English
Mount St. Mary's College


Kischner, Michael wrote:
>
> A colleague asked about this sentence:
>
>  "President Bush, who polls say has the lowest approval rating any
> second-term President, is making adjustments to his Social Security
> proposal."
>
> The "who" seems to introduce a relative (adjectival) clause, but that
> "who" also seems to introduce the noun clause that's the direct object
> of "Polls say."  I guess the question is about the "Polls say" clause.
> I can't make a Reed-Kellogg diagram of it work.
>
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