Relating

Question

These sentences violate the usual rules relating to subject-predicate agreement in number and in tense.
http://www.english-for-students.com/Subjunctive-Mood.html
is "relating" a reduced relative clause functioning as an adjective?
how do we know when to use it?
Thanks

BillJ · Accepted Answer

So you're talking about these two sentences:

{1] The rules relating to test cricket mandate that the fielding team should bowl a minimum of twenty overs in the last session.

[2] The rules relating to test cricket mandate that the fielding team bowl a minimum of twenty overs in the last session.

I don't see why you think they violate number and tense agreement. They don't. In each case, the underlined non-finite gerund-participial clause is modifying "rules". Such clauses are semantically similar to relative clauses: compare The rules which relate to test cricket .... . But we don't call them relative clauses since there is no possibility of them containing a relative phrase (cf. *The rules which relating to test cricket).

Using a gerund-participial clause like this instead of the slightly wordier relative clause tends to give a smoother and more succinct result.

Ex [1] is called a should mandative clause, and [2] a subjunctive mandative, the former being more common in BrE than in AmE.

Incidentally, I would strongly recommend dropping the term 'adjective clause'. Adjective is a word category (part of speech) not a function. Not everything that modifies a noun is an adjective, you know!

Relating

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