Should adjective clauses always be reduced to adjective phrases? - II

[Joe Carillo]

This is the concluding part of the Forum’s recent retrospective of my 2018 series on reducing adjective clauses to adjective phrases, which drew this rejoinder last October 26 from Forum member Miss Mae: “Does this mean that it’s still okay if writers don’t get to reduce adjective clauses to adjective phrases?”

Part II -  How to reduce adjective clauses to adjective phrases

We saw in last week’s column that generally, adjective clauses that use the relative pronouns “who,” “which,” and “that” can be reduced by dropping the relative pronoun and the “be” form in the adjective clause. For example, in “Many politicians who are elected to public office often treat their positions as family heirlooms,” the adjective clause “who are elected to public office” can be reduced to the adjective phrase “elected to public office” to yield this more concise sentence: “Many politicians elected to public office often treat their positions as family heirlooms.”

Recall that adjective clauses or relative clauses can either be restrictive or nonrestrictive. It’s restrictive when it provides essential information about the subject of the sentence, as the clause “that has just ended” does in “The year that has just ended was notable for its severe economic turbulence.” But it’s nonrestrictive (to indicate this, commas set off  the clause from the main clause) when it provides information not essential to the meaning of the sentence, as “which was uninhabited a decade ago” isn’t in “The island, which was uninhabited a decade ago, is now a world-class resort.”

                        IMAGE CREDIT: WWW.DIFFERENCEBETWEEN.COM

Now, whether restrictive or nonrestrictive, an adjective clause can often be reduced to an adjective phrase to make the sentence more concise. In the first example above, for instance, the restrictive adjective clause “that has just ended” can be reduced to the adjective phrase “just ended” to yield this sentence: “The year just ended was notable for its severe economic turbulence.” Similarly, in the second example, the nonrestrictive adjective clause “which was uninhabited a decade ago” can be reduced to the adjective phrase “uninhabited a decade ago” to yield this sentence: “The island, uninhabited a decade ago, is now a world-class resort.”

When a nonrestrictive adjective clause modifying the subject of a sentence is reduced to an adjective phrase, the adjective phrase can alternatively be placed in front of the subject of the sentence: “Uninhabited a decade ago, the island is now a world-class resort.” This can’t be done in the case of reduced restrictive adjective clauses. In fact, in the first sentence in which the restrictive adjective clause was reduced to an adjective phrase, putting “just ended” up front fractures the sentence: “Just ended, the year was notable for its severe economic turbulence.”

Beware, too, that it isn’t always possible to reduce an adjective clause to an adjective phrase. For example, in “The rain that fell in torrents this morning was the heaviest this year,” there’s no way at all to reduce the adjective clause “that fell in torrents this morning.” To drop the relative pronoun “that” from the adjective clause produces this fractured sentence “The rain fell in torrents this morning was the heaviest this year.”

On the other hand, to drop “that” and convert “fell” to the progressive-form “falling” to reduce the adjective clause to the adjective phrase “falling in torrents this morning” yields this semantically dubious, time-skewed sentence, “The rain falling in torrents this morning was the heaviest this year.”

Indeed, we should play it by ear when faced with the choice of reducing an adjective clause to an adjective phrase. If the reduction makes the sentence sound better without altering its sense, go right ahead. But if the reduction doesn’t sound right or changes the meaning of the sentence, simply leave the adjective clause as is, relative pronoun and all.

(Next: When notional agreement overrides grammatical agreement)    November 19, 2020

This essay, 2,019th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the November 12, 2020 Internet edition of The Manila Times,© 2020 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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