Reduced Relative Clause - Non-finite Types

Non-finite Types

In English, the similarity between the active past tense form of verbs (i.e., "John kicked the ball") and the passive past tense (i.e., "the ball was kicked") can give rise to confusion concerning a special form of reduced relative clause, called the reduced object relative passive clause (so called because the noun being modified is the direct object of the relative clause, and the relative clause is in passive voice), the most famous example of which is

The horse raced past the barn fell.

In sentences such as this, when the reader or hearer encounters the verb, he or she can interpret it in two different ways: as a main verb, or the first verb of a reduced relative clause. Linguist David W. Carrol gives the example of "the florist sent...", which could either go on to form a sentence such as "the florist sent the flowers to the elderly widow" (in which "sent" is the main verb), or one such as "the florist sent the flowers was very pleased" (in which "sent" is the beginning of a reduced relative clause). Sentences like this often produce a garden path effect—an effect whereby a reader begins a sentence with one interpretation, and later is forced to backtrack and re-analyze the sentence's structure. The diagram below illustrates the garden path effect in the sentence "the florist sent the flowers was pleased," where (1) represents the initial structure assigned to the sentence, (2) represents the garden path effect elicited when the reader encounters "was" and has nowhere to put it, and (3) represents the re-analysis of the sentence as containing a reduced relative clause.

While reduced relative clauses are not the only structures that create garden path sentences in English (other forms of garden path sentences include those caused by lexical ambiguity, or words that can have more than one meaning), they are the "classic" example of garden path sentences, and have been the subject of the most research.