✂️ Grammar B2-27: Reduced relative clauses

One deletion with one precondition. When the relative pronoun is the subject of its own clause, English lets you delete it together with the form of be, leaving a participle attached straight to the noun: the man who is standing over there becomes the man standing over there, and the book which was written by an unknown hand becomes the book written by an unknown hand. This material makes the precondition the first question, because that is where learners fail — an object relative such as the film that we watched has a different, older licence and no participle is ever available to it. It then separates the two shapes the reduction produces: the -ing form when the noun does the action, the past participle when the noun receives it. A gallery wall panel shows why signage, museum labels, journalism and academic prose reduce almost automatically, and the contrast section weighs what is gained against what disappears with the auxiliary — the tense.