The quick brown fox

[Michael Trittipo]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 12:36 PM, Stephanie Briggs <sdsures at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ah, but the sentence doesn't say "The horse that was raced past the barn
> fell" - . . . and it's against the rules :P to add or subtract words from the
> sentence.

Actually, it's not against the rules of English to elide those parts
of relative constructions. So Paul didn't subtract any words; he
quoted someone who likes to elide the introducing complement, as many
people do from time to time.

"The cup that was thrown against the pillow stayed intact; the cup
that was thrown against the wall broke."
 >>>--->>>
"The cup thrown against the pillow stayed intact; the cup thrown
against the wall broke."

The latter is exactly parallel to "the horse raced past the barn
fell," where "raced" is not the past-tense of "race" but is rather the
past participle in adjectival use: exactly the same meaning, and
possibly more naturally said by many people than the form that doesn't
elide the "that...was."  Eliding "that was" is not only perfectly
legal and perfectly grammatical, it's also common -- common enough to
have a name, "the reduced relative."  But -- when the adjectival
participle has the same form as the past tense -- it does create
garden paths.  What makes something a garden path isn't the
_difficulty_ of parsing it; it's the excessive _ease_ of parsing it
the wrong way until one bangs up against a wall and then has to
re--parse.  "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo
buffalo" is difficult to parse; but it's not a garden path.  :-)

For more than most of us would want to know:
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/annotation/syn-sub.htm#reduced_relatives

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