The mark of fluent English-language writers or speakers is the way they effortlessly do away with words that, although mandated by formal grammar, only slow down the delivery of their ideas. Nonnative users of English, on the other hand, often stick to the grammar protocols tenaciously, leaving no grammatical gaps in their sentences that might betray their less than perfect proficiency in the language. As might be expected, of course, this desire to treat syntax and semantics with mathematical precision achieves the exact opposite. It results in stiff, unidiomatic English that clearly identifies the users as nonnative ones trying mighty hard not to be perceived as such.

One aspect of English where exactitude in syntax clearly doesn’t pay is in the use of adjective clauses. Recall that adjective clauses are those extended modifiers that give more details about nouns to put them in better perspective. Adjective clauses, we will also remember, are normally introduced by the relative pronouns “that,” “which,” “who,” “whom,” “whose,” and “where,” which link the additional ideas to the main (and independent) clause.

Let’s see how this relative linking mechanism works by examining the following sentences: “The plane that is flying over the village right now is a Boeing 747.” “An old bidding strategy, which is rarely used these days, won them the lucrative contract.” “The woman who was looking for me this morning is my fiancée.” “The street where she passes every night is always well-lighted.” “The caretaker to whom she entrusted her house proved untrustworthy.” “That candidate whose English is so atrociously bad might just win the election.”

Most nonnative speakers of English, not yet wise to the highly idiomatic character of the language, will often write or articulate those adjective-clause-bearing sentences above in exactly the way they are shown. Native speakers, however, routinely shortcut the construction of such sentences; they get rid of words not essential to conveying their meaning. Their usual targets are the subordinating conjunction and the passive verb form that links the subordinate clause to the main clause. This technique, when done successfully without materially changing the meaning of the sentence, is called the reduction of adjective clauses. The simple, forthright process converts the adjective clauses into structurally simpler, more concise adjective phrases.

See what happens to the six sentences when this reduction technique is done just right (bracketed are the words that have been knocked off without changing the meaning of the sentence): “The plane [that is] flying over the village right now is a Boeing 757.” “An old bidding strategy [which is] rarely used these days won them the lucrative contract.” “The woman [who was] looking for me this morning is my fiancée.” “The street [where] she passes every night is always well-lighted.” “The caretaker [to whom] he entrusted her house with proved untrustworthy.” “That candidate [whose English is] with the atrociously bad English might just win the election.”

The adjective reduction process is simplicity itself when the relative pronoun is followed by “be” in any of its forms. In the case of the first four adjective-clause-bearing sentences above, all of which use “be,” we simply drop the linking phrases “that is,” “which was,” “who was,” and “where” and do absolutely nothing else. The meanings remain the same. But with sentences that use verbs other than “be,” the reduction often calls for a minor revision of the adjective clause to keep their meanings intact. See, for instance, how confusing the fifth sentence becomes when it simply drops “to whom” and leaves it at that: “The caretaker she entrusted her house during her absence proved untrustworthy.” Converting the relative clause into a prepositional noun phrase using “with” restores the meaning: “The caretaker she entrusted her house with during her absence proved untrustworthy.”

Reduction is also possible when what follows the relative pronoun is an active verb. The relative pronoun can then be dropped and the verb changed to its –ing form. In this way, a sentence like “Her allergy is a rabid type that arises from childhood trauma” reduces to “Her allergy is a rabid type arising from childhood trauma.” The adjective clause morphs into an adverb phrase. 

Not all sentences with adjective clauses can be reduced meaningfully, however. In particular, reduction fails when a sentence contains the modal auxiliary verbs “should,” “may,” “can,” or “must.” The element of conditionality provided by these words gets lost in the reduction, distorting the meaning of the sentence. Consider this example: “This uniform, which should be worn at all times during regular working days, will be provided free to all personnel.” Its mandatory tone vanishes in this wrongful reduction: “This uniform, worn at all times during regular working days, will be provided free to all personnel.”

Adjective clause reduction definitely makes sentences compact and smoother, but we should be careful in doing it to avoid mangling our intended ideas. (February 18, 2004)

-------
From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, February 18, 2004, © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. This piece subsequently appeared as Chapter 100 of the author’s book Give Your English the Winning Edge, © 2009 by Jose A. Carillo. All rights reserved.

Click here to discuss/comment

I recently mentioned in my column in The Manila Times that prospective Filipino call-center agents are trained to acquire a neutral American English accent to communicate more effectively with the North Americans they have to deal with over the phone. In response, a US-based reader, Celso Madarang, wrote me that he couldn’t imagine how a school or a seminar can teach people a particular English accent.

He might find it surprising, I told Celso, that there are now a good number of language institutes in the Philippines that specialize in teaching people how to acquire a desired English accent. In addition, most of the call centers themselves have in-house accent training departments that drill prospective call-center agents on the English accent the call center specifically needs.

In fact, my eldest son Eduardo underwent one such English accent training the other year when, on a lark, he tried applying for a call-center job. He got accepted and worked as a call-center agent for two months. He eventually quit because as a working student, he couldn’t take the “graveyard shift” from 10:00 p.m.-7:00 a.m. anymore, but the accent training certainly gave him a very pleasant American English accent. It served him very well in his job as part-time instructor in computer basics and web programming in a leading Metro Manila computer school (and, if I may add as a postscript, in his current job as a call-center technical support representative).

I also told Celso that lately, I had also been pleasantly surprised to learn that American English accent training is being taught in an even more massive way in India, particularly in Bangalore. India, having been colonized by the British for almost 200 years, has a strong English-language heritage like the Philippines, but most people in India happen to have such a pronounced natural singsong accent when speaking in English. That accent therefore needs to be neutralized for globalization’s sake, and I told Celso that I had come across a detailed account of how this is being done. This was in an early chapter of Thomas Friedman’s bestselling book on globalization, The World is Flat, that I am currently reading.

Friedman recounts that English-language trainers drill the Indians with stupendously complicated English-language phonetic drills. Among them is this mean tongue-twister: “Thirty little turtles in a bottle of bottled water. A bottle of bottled water held thirty little turtles. It didn’t matter that each turtle has to rattle a metal ladle in order to get a little bit of noodles.” Indeed, when I tried enunciating this particular phonetic drill, my tongue got so hopelessly tangled inside my mouth. I suppose, though, that the drills are doing wonders to the Indians, for I understand there are now tens of thousands of them serving as call-center agents for North American target markets.

These thoughts that I shared with Celso drew the following rejoinder from him:

“About my interest in how someone develops accents, I want to tell you about an experience I had when I was in Sydney, Australia, in 1966 when the ship I was with was on rest and recreation after a three-month tour in the Tongkin Gulf war zone in Vietnam. For the two weeks that the ship was in port, it was designated as a visiting ship. This meant that civilians could come on board to mingle with the crew and see how the sailors lived; our living quarters, of course, were understandably off-limits.

“Anyway, a group of Filipinos came on board one day. We got into conversations that alternated between Tagalog and English. In one of those conversations, a female Australian among the ship’s crew told me that I had ‘such a beautiful accent.’ Now, that remark really surprised me because I knew I didn’t have an accent; indeed, it was she and the others who had an accent—an Australian one—that they seemed not to be even aware they had. Isn’t that funny?”(August 09, 2008)

-------
From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, August 9, 2008, © 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved

Click here to discuss/comment