✂️ 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.
Lesson Plan
- Two words in a relative clause often do no work: the pronoun and the form of be.
- The full clause and the reduced version side by side, with what each one buys.
- The precondition stated at once: subject relatives only.
Key Vocabulary
Grammar Points
- Subject relative + be: delete the pronoun and be together, leaving a participle, prepositional phrase or adjective phrase — the passengers waiting at gate 4, the woman in the grey coat.
- Active clauses leave an -ing form, passive clauses leave the past participle — the officers questioning the witness versus the officer questioned by the panel.
- A subject relative with no be still reduces: the verb itself becomes the -ing form — people who live nearby, people living nearby.
- Negatives and progressive passives survive the cut: anyone not travelling today, the crates being loaded now.
- Non-defining clauses reduce and keep both commas: Odile Kastrup, appointed curator in 2019, rehung the collection.
- Object relatives, whose-clauses, where-clauses and clauses built on a modal cannot be reduced — only the object pronoun may be dropped.
Prerequisites
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