[Corpora-List] Passive voice verbs in reduced relative clauses

Sean Igo sgigo at xmission.com
Mon Jan 1 18:06:29 UTC 2007


Good day and Happy New Year, all.

I'm interested in an English garden-path phenomenon which arises when 
verbs in passive voice occur in reduced relative clauses, e.g.:

"The horse _raced_ past the barn fell."

as opposed to the non-reduced relative clause version,

"The horse that _was raced_ past the barn fell."

The lack of the passive auxiliary makes the voice of "raced" difficult 
to determine in the first example.

Is there any research which addresses this issue?

Thank you,
Sean Igo



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