Omitting "be" before Past Participles

Question

hi,In sentences of the form NOUN+PAST PARTICIPLE such as:"The person (that is) seated in front of me keeps turning back.""I don't want it (to be) repeated."Is it redundant or wrong to add back the words in brackets?Also, can a verb be followed by a past participle?"Anything you would not want repeated on the evening news"Thanks.

Clive · Accepted Answer

Hi,

In sentences of the form NOUN+PAST PARTICIPLE such as:

"The person (that is) seated in front of me keeps turning back."
"I don't want it (to be) repeated."

Is it redundant or wrong to add back the words in brackets? No, it's fine.

Also, can a verb be followed by a past participle?
"Anything you would not want repeated on the evening news" This is also fine and normal.

Best wishes, Clive

Starstuff · Answer

Thanks Clive <img class='emoticon' style='Width:19px;Height:19px;' data-delaysrc='https://uat-englishforward-forums-backend.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Emoticons/1.gif' src='https://uat-englishforward-forums-backend.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Emoticons/1.gif' alt='Emotion: smile'/>

Marius Hancu · Answer

matter of choice, it's more compact without those words in brackets, and quite clear in this case

Paco2004 · Answer

Hello StarS

The three things you asked about are different each other from the standpoint of grammar.

(1)"The person (who is) seated in front of me keeps turning back."

This kind of relative-clause contraction is called "WHIZ deletion" in a grammatical term. "WHIZ deletion" is very common in English, and many of words or phrases modifying a noun from behind can be understood as "WHIZ deletion". For example, let's take an example: "The church in the town is dedicated to St. Peter". Here "the church in the town" is a WHIZ deletion of "the church (which is) in the town".

(2)"I don't want it (to be) repeated."

"Want something to be done" is commonly contracted into "want something done". So "I want my shirt ironed" is more common than "I want my shirt to be ironed", although both are equally grammatical.

(3)"Anything you would not want repeated on the evening news"

This "want repeated" is not "a verb + a participle". The sentence should be parsed as : "{Anything (that) you would not want} repeated on the evening news". The part of { } is the sentential subject accompanied by an adjectival clause.

paco

Starstuff · Answer

Thanks a lot Marius and Paco!

Anonymous · Answer

Hi,

I just came across these old posts. There is actually some linguistic research on to what extent the distribution of optional "that" or the optional 'whiz' (e.g. "that is") in certain types of relative clauses is driven by redundancy.

This is probably not quite what was being discussed here, but it turns out that the absence and presence of such optional words is at least partly determined by how redundant the information is that they carry in a particular sentence. If you're interested in something like that, have a look at: http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/fjaeger/?articles.html . The following articles deal with this question:

Wasow, T., Jaeger, T.F., and Orr, D. in progress. Lexical Variation in Relativizer Frequency. For the Workshop on Expecting the unexpected: Exceptions in Grammar at the27th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistic Association, University of Cologne, Germany

.Jaeger, T.F. 2010. Redundancy and reduction: Speakers manage syntactic information density. Cognitive Psychology 61(1), 23-62.

Jaeger, T.F. submitted. Corpus-based Research on Language Production: Information Density and Reducible Subject Relatives.

Much of this work is also summarized in: Jaeger, T.F. and Tily, H. submitted. On Language ‘Utility’: Processing Complexity and Communicative Efficiency. WIRE: Cognitive Science.

Florian (yes, this is blatant self-advertisement)

Omitting "be" before Past Participles

Top answer

Get the Weekly English Kit 📬

Related Questions