Reduced Adjective Clauses and Appositives

Reduced Adjective Clauses

In the spoken language speakers reduce the sentences and they try to save time.

Let see an example>

The man who is reading the newspaper is my uncle.

As we can see, "who is" links the many with the action. But what if I do it shorter? Is it possible? Yes, it is. I can reduce this sentence whithout "who is".

The man reading the newspapes is my uncle.

This procedure helps to use less words in a sentence and say what you want faster.

Rules for reducing

1) It is possible to reduce adjective clauses that use adjective clauses pronouns.

The girl who is talking on the phone is my cousin.
Here I can reduce because after "who" there is present progressive (to be + gerund).
So, the reduced sentence is "The girl talking on the phone is my cousin.

2) Check the verb situation

Pay attention to the next situations:

a) The boy who is playing the violin is great!
b) The woman who is on the righ.
c) The environment is polluted by the human
d) The house that was painted by my father is very big.

It is possible to reduce the clauses cutting the be verb. Then we get the next options.

a) The boy playing the violin is great!
b) The woman on the righ.
c) The environment polluted by the human
d) The house painted by my father is very big.

But what happens if there is a negative sentence? Read the next example

I like to see people who are not smoking.

In this case we cut "who" and "are", but we do not cut not. Then we get the next sentence>

I like to see people not smoking.

Absence of be verb

People who smoke has a high risk of dying.

In this case it is possible to cut "who" and add the ending -ing to the verb smoke.

People smoking has a high risk of dying.