Passive clauses without auxiliaries

Question

Sentences such as I came across a letter that was typed by her secretary, can be "reduced" by removing that and the auxiliary verb, yielding I came across a letter typed by her secretary. In this particular case, the by phrase, or some other modifying phrase such as that morning or in red ink appears to be obligatory. You can't simply say, *I came across a letter typed, although you can say I came across a typed letter.

In other cases, though, this seems to be OK; consider All the students arrested were from King's College.

In what cases is a dependent required to make the clause grammatical? Can anyone point me to a discussion of this in a reliable reference grammar, preferably the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language? I see it mentioned there on p. 78, but this particular issue is not discussed.

Answer 1

In both of your sentences, what you have is the passive participle typed, which syntactically functions as a noun modifier. When typed is being used alone, it follows the normal rules for modifier placement and precedes the noun:

I found a typed letter.

However, as a passive participle typed is able to take an adverbial complement that specifies the agent. When this occurs, the entire phrase must then follow the noun.

I found a letter typed by the secretary.

This rule is not unique to passive participles: in general, English requires single-word modifiers to precede a noun, but multi-word modifiers to follow the noun. (The exact rules are fairly complex, but the preceding rule of thumb covers the most common cases.) You can see the same thing with active participles ending in -ing and ordinary adjectives.

I saw a red ball.

I saw a ball red as the rising sun.

I met a dying man.

I met a man dying of AIDS.

I don't have a copy of the CGEL to refer to, but if you look up the section on adjective and adjective phrases I'm sure you'll find a discussion of adjectival word order.

Answer 2

Note that this pattern also exists for the verb to be: the man who is tall becomes the tall man whereas the man who is in the room becomes the man in the room.

I think the answer to your question lies in the rules for adjectives which follow the nouns that they modify. These reduced adjective clauses are, for all purposes, adjectives themselves and when they are reduced to a single word, they are positioned as a normal adjective, that is before the noun. However they follow the noun when they have more than one word after being reduced, just as with other multiple word adjectives in English (except hyphenated adjectives).

For example, you can't say He has a black as the night soul but you can say He has a soul black as the night. The adjective phrase black as the night follows the noun soul because it is a phrase not a single word.

Answer 3

You can't simply say, *I came across a letter typed,

This is not so.

“As I went through his correspondence, the letters were all handwritten until I came across a letter typed.” Here, typed is a depictive adjective. The sentence equates to “I came across a letter and it was typed.”

In I came across a typed letter, from the syntax, typed* is clearly functioning as an adjective.

It is the distinction between adjective and verb that has to be maintained in order to express an idea clearly.

In I came across a letter [that was] typed by her secretary, compared to *I came across a letter typed.” you will notice two things:

1 The lack of an agent in the latter.

2 Except for the depictive reading, the natural reading of the latter goes to understanding of “typed” as a postpositional common adjective but, because of standard syntax, it is non-standard/not idiomatic here.

With the disappearance of clear grammatical cases, syntax took on a crucial role in English.

In I came across a letter [that was] typed by her secretary, typed must be understood as a past participle – a verb. This can be done by

3 including “that was” and/or

4. including “by her secretary”, which is adverbial. However this is not essential to the understanding, as adverbs may qualify verbs or adjectives, but it does not hinder the understanding of "typed" as a verb as the listener reader will recognise a passive.

Now consider

I came across the number of species that were seen/recorded by the members.

I came across the number of species seen/recorded by the members.

I came across the number of species seen/recorded.

I came across the number of seen/recorded species.

Answer 4

1. I came across a letter that was typed.

The Original Poster notes that the relative clause in this sentence doesn’t seem to able to be “reduced” and that you can’t simply say *I came across a letter typed, although you can say I came across a typed letter.

The word typed in (1) seems to refer to the state of the letter, its medium. Notice that we could change the word was for the word looked here without changing the sense of this word:

2. I came across a letter that looked typed.

These three facts—that the word typed seems to refer to the then state of the letter; that it can precede the noun letter, but not follow it; that it can function as the complement of the verb looked—show that this word is an adjective, not a verb.

Some verbs describe states or situations, whilst others describe actions or events. We call the latter dynamic verbs. The adjectives derived from the past participles of verbs, however, always refer to states, regardless of the meaning of the original verb (See The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, henceforth CGEL, pp. 1437-1439). Type is a verb with a dynamic meaning: typing is a clatterous affair, especially if done on a typewriter. The fact that typed in (1) has a stative interpretation shows it to be an adjective.

Secondly, setting aside the special case of never-attributive adjectives, adjective phrases which don’t contain any material after the adjective must usually precede the nouns they modify (CGEL, p. 445). Adjective phrases containing material after the adjective must follow a noun they modify :

3. a huge mouse / *a mouse huge
4. *a worried about her patient doctor/a doctor worried about her patient.

For this reason, the relative clause in (1) cannot be “reduced” because this would result in an ungrammatical [noun + single adjective] sequence. More generally, then, we cannot “reduce” relative clauses where the complement of the deleted be is a single adjective. It’s worth noticing, in passing, that we cannot reduce relative clauses if the complement of the verb be is a noun phrase. Compare I came across a man who was a doctor and *I came across a man a doctor.

Thirdly, the verbs seem, look, appear, remain and become can take adjectives as complements, but not participle verbs (CGEL p. 79):

7. *Bob looks smiling / Bob looks interesting
8. *The apples seemed eaten with gusto / The apples seemed rotten.

One further piece of evidence here is that if the speaker still has the letter referred to in (1), she might pull it out and say:

9. Look! This letter is typed.

… where the word typed seems to have the same meaning as it has in (1). If typed was a verb referring to the typing event, as opposed to an adjective referring to the medium of the letter, we would expect was not is here.

However, although this is by far and away the most likely reading of (1), it is at least technically possible that the relative clause contains a past simple, passive construction with was as a passive auxiliary and typed as a past participle verb. The problem is that it is difficult to find a context where this would be a pragmatically felicitous utterance. Integrated relative clauses tend to be used to enable listeners to pick out identifiable objects or people, or to describe an integral attribute or property of the denotee of the noun. The idiom came across indicates that the speaker just happened to encounter the letter, and the indefinite article, a, indicates the listener will not recognise which letter the speaker is talking about. It also implies that the letter has not been mentioned in the previous discourse. It is difficult to understand why the speaker would make direct reference to the typing action or event, which they presumably did not witness. If, however, you could find a context in which such a reading of (1) was felicitous, you would be able to “reduce” the clause to just a single past participle verb, typed.

We can try to contrive an example where such a reading of (1) might be felicitous. However, it should be understood that whether this works or not makes no difference to the general point that you can “reduce” a relative clause to a single past participle verb. Here goes:

• The secretarial pool had had a marathon typing session the previous day churning out letters for MPs. The next day in the mail room, I came across a letter which was typed, and noticed that not only was it full of spelling mistakes, …

If that strikes you as pragmatically felicitous then so should the version with the “reduced” clause:

• The secretarial pool had had a marathon typing session the previous day churning out letters for MPs. The next day in the mail room, I came across a letter typed, and noticed that not only was it full of spelling mistakes, …

The Original Poster’s Question

The essence of the original question is: When can we reduce integrated relative clauses to just one -ed word? The answer is that we can normally “reduce” the clause if the -ed word is a verb, but not if it is an adjective.

As described in CGEL on p.78, and in several other places, participle clauses can freely be used to postmodify nouns. They don’t mention any special restrictions on participle clauses consisting of just one word, mainly because there aren’t any. However, in the same way that several factors may affect the felicity of an integrated relative clause, the same is true of participle clauses used to modify nouns. If the original relative clause is felicitous, so will the "reduced" clause be.

It is perfectly fine, therefore, to “reduce” a relative clause to leave a single past participle, typed:

• A letter that was typed was a dollar that was earned.
• A letter typed was a dollar earned.
• All letters that are typed must be vetted by the head secretary.
• All letters typed must be vetted by the head secretary.
• We pay £20 for every letter that is typed.
• We pay £20 for every letter typed.

Answer 5

The reason Huddleston and Pullum don’t discuss it is perhaps that it is as at least as much a semantic question as a grammatical one. Typing is a process and, as such, not something you just come across. Moreover, a mundane process such as typing is not one you would normally want to comment on unless you wanted to draw attention to the fact that it was typed by her secretary, or typed that morning or typed in red ink. By contrast, it would be quite reasonable to say I have seen a jet engine assembled because that is something you see rather than come across, and it is sufficiently out of the ordinary to report for its own sake.