Re: USAGE: Garden paths

Nik Taylor wrote:

> J Matthew Pearson wrote:
> > Furthermore, it's not just any old transitive/intransitive verbs which you don't like in
> > reduced relatives--it's specifically those which lack a separate morphological form for
> > the past participle.
>
> I'm not so sure, "The horse raced by the jockey past the barn fell down"
> is an odd, but still acceptable, sentence to me - once again, there's a
> "by" phrase.  *"The poll conducted was inconclusive" is unacceptable,
> and it lacks a "by" phrase.  "The horse ridden past the barn fell down"
> is almost as unacceptable (at least in as much as I would never produce
> it) as with "raced", and that HAS a separate participial form, so it
> can't be morphology at work.
I agree with your judgements about the first sentence, but I think just proves my point:  The
"by"-phrase signals that "raced" is a past participle, thereby aiding in processing the
sentence.  As for your second sentence, that's merely a consequence of the fact that (out of
context) "conducted" sounds funny without a "by"-phrase, and has nothing to do with the
construction in question ("The poll was conducted", is, I think, no better and no worse than
"The poll conducted was inconclusive").  As for "The horse ridden past the barn fell down", I
find this sentence much better than "The horse raced...".

My position remains the same:  I contend that the variations in your judgements (and mine) are
the result of processing difficulties (or lack thereof) and have nothing to do with the
syntactic constraints on reduced relatives.

Matt.