Newsgroup: it.cultura.linguistica.inglese
Titolo: clause

ciao
penso di non aver capito alla perfezione le reduced relative clause .
Esiste un sito dove vengano spiegate nella loro totalità??? grazie
ps. perchè la regola non vale per le cose che si fanno abitualmente?

 ps. perchè la regola non vale per le cose che si fanno abitualmente?
Quale regola?

 Cosa sono?
stavo per chiedere la stessa cosa.

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C'è una spiegazione, in inglese, qui:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/clauses/redrel.htm
Altri esempi si trovanno qui:
http://www.eslgold.com/grammar/reduced_relative_clauses.html
Alex

Non so come si possono chiamare in italiano ...sono semplicemente delle
omissioni all'interno di una frase.
esempio: the man who is running is my brother=the man running is...
              people who buy lottery tikets are.......=people buying
lottery tikets are...
ad ogni modo ho letto che tutto questo non può essere applicato alle
cose ripetitive o hobbies.........tipo: people who play golf are always
prepared for inclement weather
non può diventare: people playing golf are always .........
cheers

 non può diventare: "people playing golf are always"
E perchè mai?
Tschüss,
Enrico il Pentolaio.
--
"E ora ridateci la Gioconda!" 

lorenzo ha scritto:
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Se il verbo non è progressive, mi pare ovvio.
In quel caso non puoi omettere il pronome relativo, e NON puoi dire:
* "The man usually cooks our breakfast is my father."
Però, mi pare che si trovino anche frasi del tipo...
"On the 3 to 11 and 11 to 7 shifts the people usually doing the
cleaning were
nursing assistants who were supposed to be doing direct patient care,
..."
da:
Medicare Oversight: Hearing Before the Select Committee on Aging, House
of Representatives,... - Pagina 10
di United States. Congress. House. Select Committee on Aging - 1980
|
http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC07281312&id=4XcZbXg_hvkC&q=%22people+usually+doing%22&dq=%22people+usually+doing%22&hl=it

 wrote in message 
news:1153263804.5...@b28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
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I've never heard of a reduced relative clause before . A quick look at your 
first link doesn't reveal who's responsible for the content , but it is 
quite different to standard English grammatical terminology , and in fact 
appears to unnecessarily complicate what is simple enough ; it would 
certainly totally confuse anyone used to standard terminology (for instance 
, a clause doesn't have to contain a finite verb , a superordinate clause is 
a complete sentence (simple or complex!) , what I know as a main clause 
becomes subordinate , a noun clause is a nominal relative clause... I looked 
no further !) .
I can't see that any problem could exist here if the reduced relative clause 
had not been invented .
Why not just accept that the English participles may be used as adjectives ? 
Of course , such an adjective could always be expanded into a relative cause 
using a continuous tense : 'A living language is always changing' > 'A 
language which is living is ...' ; 'The fire blazing in the grate lit up the 
room' > 'The fire which was blazing in the grate lit up... ' ; but then so 
can any adjective : 'A fat man' > 'A man who is fat' ;  'A woman anxious to 
please is like a ...' > 'A woman who is anxious to please is like a ...'
Adjectives (unqualified by appropriate adverbs) don't normally indicate a 
repetitive attribute of the noun they describe .
However , for more detail and examples see my comments on other posts in 
this thread .
Mike 

non può diventare: people playing golf are always .........
But why would anyone think that it could be ? It's an invented problem . All 
the learner really wants to know is how to express repeated or habitual 
activity .
In fact (though this complicates the issue a little , I'm afraid) there is a 
usage involving the participle which does describe repeated/habitual actions 
: for instance , 'golf-paying people' are *not* 'people playing golf' but 
actually 'people who play golf' !  'Our frog-eating neighbours' (ie the 
French) are not the same as 'Our neighbours eating frogs' .
Mike


Because it changes the meaning . (a) people who habitually play golf are at 
all times prepared for inclement weather  (b) people who are in the process 
of playing golf are invariably prepared ... , though the second case is 
really very artificial and unlikely .
Mike 

 ps. perchè la regola non vale per le cose che si fanno abitualmente?
Se il verbo non è progressive, mi pare ovvio.
In quel caso non puoi omettere il pronome relativo, e NON puoi dire:
* "The man usually cooks our breakfast is my father."
Però, mi pare che si trovino anche frasi del tipo...
"On the 3 to 11 and 11 to 7 shifts the people usually doing the
cleaning were
nursing assistants who were supposed to be doing direct patient care,
..."
That's true , but here it's the adverb 'usually' which supplies the meaning 
of habitual action .
Mike 

 non può diventare: people playing golf are always .........
Tuttavia...
Golf: A Woman's Guide - Pagina 16
di Susan Comolli Davis - Sports & Recreation - 2001 - 144 pagine
"Your lessons should expose you to the course and the object of the
game, but I
see far too many people playing golf who can't make contact with the
ball. ..."
 Hearings Before and Special Reports Made by Committee on Armed
Services of the House of... - Pagina 228
di United States. Congress. House. Committee on Armed Services
"We have figures which indicate that we have about 20000 people playing
golf on
the average down there that are enlisted, and then another 15 or so
thousand ..."
  Business Humor: Jokes & How to Deliver Them - Pagina 159
di Gene Perret - Humor - 1998 - 192 pagine
"... I've met a lot of interesting people playing golf. They were folks
I met while
asking for directions back to the golf course. ..."
 The Way to Golf - Pagina 148
di Harry Weetman - 1953 - 159 pagine
"I am no politician and do not know very much about international
relations, but
I do know that you meet some grand people playing golf, no matter what
their ..."
   Scotland: An Intimate Portrait - Pagina 52
di Geddes MacGregor - History - 1990 - 288 pagine
"Almost everywhere you go in Scotland you will see people playing golf.
It is not
only a game for the well-to-do as it is in England and the United
States. ..."
But the point was that 'people playing golf' cannot be used to mean 'people 
who play golf' , but rather 'people who are playing golf' - and the examples 
you give actually confirm rather than refute this . In the third example , 
of course , 'playing golf' doesn't qualify 'people' at all - it refers back 
to 'I' (ie 'whilst I was playing golf') - indeed , the point of the joke is 
that the 'people' *weren't* playing golf .
Mike 

Per quanto riguarda i participi presenti usati al posto di frasi
relative per i miei alunni di turismo ho trovato questa spiegazione che
mi pare abbastanza chiara. Inserisco (in fondo a questo post) sia il
link che la spiegazione.
Del resto cmq non è un'operazione estranea ad altre lingue europee,
né lo era per l'italiano - solo che il participio presente si è poi
prevalentemente (cioè.... "in modo che prevale" :-) ) cristallizzato
in nomi e aggettivi ("cantante" - "adiacente") e non viene più
percepito come frase relativa.
Diverso è il discorso sull'omissione del pronome relativo quando
questo abbia funzione di complemento oggetto o complemento indiretto
con la preposizione in fondo.
Es.
I saw the man you like.
That's the man I went out with.
Aggiungo anche se il pronome relativo è obbligatorio nel caso abbia
funzione di soggetto, in alcune parlate viene omesso lo stesso (sono un
po' una aficionada di Eastenders... lì spesso lo omettono). Però guai
se me lo fanno i miei alunni ! :-)
Cheers
Claudia
Ecco link e spiegazione
http://www.onestopenglish.com/grammar/Reference/Relative_Clauses/
PARTICIPLE RELATIVE CLAUSES
Present and past participle forms, (e.g: talking, made) can be used
without a pronoun or auxiliary to form a participle relative clause,
e.g.:
Do you know the boy talking to Thomas?
The participle relative clause underlined in the example has the same
meaning as a defining relative clause with the relative pronoun who,
i.e:
Do you know the boy who is talking to Thomas?
A participle relative clause with an -ing (present participle) form
can be used like a defining relative clause to identify which person or
thing you are referring to, e.g.:
The house has three bedrooms. The bedroom overlooking the garden... (=
which overlooks the garden)
-ing participle clauses also often show what someone or something is,
or was, doing at a particular time, e.g.:
Who were those children waiting outside?
(= ... who were waiting outside..)
Police investigating the robbery are asking people to come forward.
(= ...who are investigating the robbery..)
Participle relative clauses with an -ed (past participle) form are
also used like defining relative clauses to identify a particular
person or thing. They have a passive meaning, e.g.:
The woman injured in the accident was expecting a baby.
(= who was injured in the accident...)
All cakes sold in the café are made on the premises.
(= which are sold in the café ...)
It is also possible to use participle relative clauses as non-defining
relative clauses which add information. Like other non-defining
relative clauses, these participle clauses are surrounded by commas,
e.g.:
His first novel, published in 1965, was an immediate success.
(= which was published in 1965...)
John's father, lying on the sofa, was trying to take a nap.
(= who was lying on the sofa)

 you give actually confirm rather than refute this .
I see. In fact, I was wondering about this, and you straightened it
out. :)

 neighbours eating frogs' .
Di recente hanno ingoiato dei brutti rospi...
:-D
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 second is clearly not the first simply with something omitted ).
grande mike!!! spiegazione ottima.
la sola cosa che ora ti voglio chiedere è:posso tradurre "people
buying lottery....."in
"gente comprante biglietti....."intendendo la ing- form ome participio
presente
quindi aggettivo e quindi avente lo stesso significato della prima
frase?
Non me lo sto inventendo l' ho solo letto qui
http://international.ouc.bc.ca/chalkntalk/
sempre mille grazie per gli aiuti
lorenzo

This site has an interesting guide into the grammatical basics of
writing:
http://www.ucalgary.ca/uofc/eduweb/grammar/
It can help you understand how English is structured and thus enable
you to express your ideas more effectively. 
Alex


It seems very useful!
Kiuhnm

 second is clearly not the first simply with something omitted ).
grande mike!!! spiegazione ottima.
la sola cosa che ora ti voglio chiedere č:posso tradurre "people
buying lottery....."in
"gente comprante biglietti....."intendendo la ing- form ome participio
presente
quindi aggettivo e quindi avente lo stesso significato della prima
frase?
Non me lo sto inventendo l' ho solo letto qui
http://international.ouc.bc.ca/chalkntalk/
sempre mille grazie per gli aiuti
I've looked at that site , and the section on 'reduced relative clauses' to 
which you refer . No wonder you're confused . If you really want , I'll go 
through it and point out all the faults , but it'd be a long-winded task , 
and you're better off simply accepting that the whole section is seriously 
confused , and is best ignored altogether .
There is one interesting example , though :
a)Those students who want to go to Big White for snowboarding  need to pay 
soon
b)Those students wanting to go to Big White for snowboarding need to pay 
soon .
Both mean the same . In other words , the so-called 'reduced relative 
clause' isn't after all simply a matter of missing out the relative pronoun 
and the auxiliary of a continuous tense .
This site , like the one cited by Alex and indeed that cited by Claudia , 
simply reinforces my view that all this is a way of making very complicated 
(and certainly confusing) what is in fact relatively simple . In the 
sentence 'The man talking to my sister is a Danish conductor' why call 
'talking to my sister' a reduced relative clause ? It isn't a clause , it's 
a phrase ; it describes a noun , so it's adjectival ; it's function and 
meaning are identical to the adjectival phrase 'in conversation with my 
sister' ; so why don't we just call it an adjectival phrase ? Since an 
adjective , an adjective phrase , and an adjective (or relative) clause have 
similar functions , it will not be surprising to find that what applies to 
one applies to all  - e.g. the separation using commas to distinguish the 
definitive from the descriptive use ; nor will it be surprising that the 
adjective (whether or not it is in the participial form) can be expanded to 
an adjective phrase , and an adjective phrase can be expanded into an 
adjective clause . Would anyone claim that an adjective is a reduced 
relative clause ('The fat man' = 'the man who is fat') ?
In general , the stuff about 'ing' on that site seems to over-complicate the 
matter . I would say :-
The -ING form of a verb has three  main uses :
1) It forms , together with the appropriate tense of the verb 'to be' , the 
continuous form of every active tense of the verb (i.e. present continuous = 
present tense of 'to be' + ...ING ; future perfect continuous = future 
perfect of 'to be'+ ...ING , and so on)
2) It forms the Gerund , sometimes called the Verbal Noun - because it's 
used like any other noun . (In the case of expressions like 'swimming pool' 
or parking lot' , we simply have portmanteau words formed by the collocation 
of two nouns , which are commonplace in English (love nest , dog pound 
etc.))
3) It's used as an adjective .
  It can be used to introduce an adjective phrase : the man *talking to my 
sister* ; the cat *sitting on my lap* etc.
(So there's no need to fuss around with subsections pointing out that a 
gerund can be used as an object , and that it can be used as a subject - 
it's a noun , so that's what you'd expect! The same applies to all the fuss 
about the adjectival use ; for example , the site you refer to above says 
that usually only one-word participles [!! but participles *are* one word !] 
go before the noun , whereas the reduced relative clause (!) goes after : 
but this is a familiar truth about adjectives and adjective phrases in 
general  : 'the fat man' , but 'the man with fat fingers' ; how many 
learners who've got as far as this would dream of saying 'the with fat 
fingers man' !)
Of course , there are subtleties of usage beyond what I've said above , but 
much of the pother in the sites referred to seems to me counter-productive .
Mike

 wrote in message 
news:1153380301.1...@b28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
Per quanto riguarda i participi presenti usati al posto di frasi
relative per i miei alunni di turismo ho trovato questa spiegazione che
mi pare abbastanza chiara. Inserisco (in fondo a questo post) sia il
link che la spiegazione.
Del resto cmq non è un'operazione estranea ad altre lingue europee,
né lo era per l'italiano - solo che il participio presente si è poi
prevalentemente (cioè.... "in modo che prevale" :-) ) cristallizzato
in nomi e aggettivi ("cantante" - "adiacente") e non viene più
percepito come frase relativa.
Diverso è il discorso sull'omissione del pronome relativo quando
questo abbia funzione di complemento oggetto o complemento indiretto
con la preposizione in fondo.
Es.
I saw the man you like.
That's the man I went out with.
Aggiungo anche se il pronome relativo è obbligatorio nel caso abbia
funzione di soggetto, in alcune parlate viene omesso lo stesso (sono un
po' una aficionada di Esatenders... lì spesso lo omettono). Però guai

http://www.onestopenglish.com/grammar/Reference/Relative_Clauses/

But it's just not clear (to me) how all this adds anything to the 
proposition that present participles are used as adjectives , and to 
introduce adjective phrases .
After all , 'identifying which person or thing you are referring to' is 
likely to be an already very familiar function of the adjective , adjective 
phrase and adjective clause ! and so on .
And since in standard usage a clause is a unit consisting of a subject and 
predicate (i.e. containing a finite verb) , the term 'participial clause' 
appears unhelpful ; indeed , one of the sites linked to in this thread 
actually points out that a reduced relative clause is a phrase . It all 
reminds me rather of when I learnt a bit of Modern Greek , and the textbooks 
available in English seemed to conspire to reduce to total confusion what 
could actually have been presented as quite a straightforward basic verb 
system .
Mike

Well Mike , to be honest I tend to avoid using too much grammar
terminology with my students (Italian teenagers at secondary school)
mostly because they have little knowledge of the Italian one (in spite
of studying it over and over again...) and secondly because the English
one is different anyway...
I try to describe language in a way which might not be defined as
orthodox.... but i don't care...
So I never did really ask myself whether the -ing form was a clause a
phrase or what, I just thought it was important to stress that it's an
alternative to express the same meaning as a relative clause, an
alternative which is common to many European languages as it once was
for Italian ... What I pasted was good for me more for the examples
than for the explanation.
Now let me argue for just a second on your terminolgy :-)
I myself tend to repeat a thousand times the three uses of the -ing
form (a fascinating form for me, i love the way language works) but I
ususally (correctly???) call "gerund" the first, that is what goes to
form continuous tenses - maybe because these tenses have an Italian
counterpart which is "stare + gerundio" (though it has a much more
limited, less defined use).
I call the second welll.... infinito sostantivato (noun infinitive?) ,
and the third (what we have been talking about ) participio presente
(present partciple) because that' s what it is in Italian conjugation.
But is it really THAT important?
Thanks for a brilliant discussion
Claudia

BTW same Claudia different e-mail address....

 wrote in message 
news:1153488646....@b28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
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I agree in general with your point about orthodoxy of terminology , and the 
terms you use with your students no doubt work better in that specific 
context because they relate more immediately to their own language ; but if 
they (perhaps later) come across other grammatical texts , then , as perhaps 
for some adult learners reading this ng , the result might be confusion . 
Unfortunately , as you know , English and Italian grammatical terms (oddly , 
since both derive from the Latin) can be false friends (even 'frase' and 
'phrase' ) . As I mentioned , I found whilst learning Greek that the 
astonishing variety of ways the same grammatical feature was referred to in 
different books was a major obstacle to understanding. So I'll comment on 
your final points all the same :)
In English terminology , there's no doubt that the 'ing' form used to make 
continuous tenses is the present participle , as is that used as an 
adjective ; just as the past participle is used to make compound tenses 
(active perfect and passive) and also as an adjective .
Whilst the gerund in English may in function correspond to the infinito 
sostantivo (it is after all an infinite part of the verb acting as a noun - 
hence the alternative and more useful name of 'verbal noun') 'noun 
infinitive' would be misleading - since , unlike the Italian , it isn't the 
infinitive ! Also , the English infinitive can itself behave as a noun : 'To 
hear is to obey , O master!'
Mike 

 But is it really THAT important?
I guess it's not that important. Native speakers learn their own
language even if they don't know grammar terminology. Listen and
repeat, listen and repeat.
Having said that, if you choose to use grammar terminology, I think you
had better use standard English terminology, not Italian grammar terms.
For instance, "simple past" is not the same as "passato remoto",
"present perfect" is not "passato prossimo", and the "subjunctive mood"
 is not used as the "modo congiuntivo". :)

  is not used as the "modo congiuntivo". :)
Well, I still think the best approach is to use what is good for the
students to understand... I try to use as little complicated grammar
terminology as i can, and if I have to explain a rule I tend to compare
rather than ignore one language or the other.
For example I know pretty well that the passato prossimo is not at all
the same in use as the present perfect, but they are similar in their
construction, so I mention both and try - often hopelessly -  to make
my students see that also the use of grammar names can be meaningful
("passato prossimo" means something completely different from "present
perfect").
I don't like using expressions such as "genitivo sassone" or "duration
form" that English speakers do not understand, but they are in some
(Italian) books so I cannot ignore them. I simply explain that they are
not used by native speakers.
I think there is no true or perfect way - the only honest thing is to
admit that and do one's best.... The job of teaching a language is too
closely linked to the situation one's in. In the vocational school
where I taught for the last 12 years the knowledge the students have of
their own language is terribly poor (and I don't mean just grammar
terminology... You should read their "temi"....) , I try to give them
some conscience in the way English (but also Italian) works, but my
main aim is for them to be able to express themselves. The situation
will probably be a bit different in the school where I'm going next
year, where I hope I'll be able to always speak English, but then
again, who knows?
I know that the way I learnt English is a mixture of great teaching ( I
had a wonderful mother-tongue teacher at liceo linguistico), a lot of
passion, a lot of reading (in and about the language), a lot of
practice with native speakers ... I try to give my students some of
it...

 In the vocational school where I taught for the last 12 years...
[CUT]
Just out of curiosity... are you the same "claudia" I have on my Skype 
contact list or am I missing something?
Tschüss,
Enrico il Pentolaio.
--
"E ora ridateci la Gioconda!"
My still-in-construction website: 
www.pentolaio.tk
 

 contact list or am I missing something?
Ok, never mind.
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