The Running Boy

[fluffyhamster]

(Speedtyped, this) Students have recently been studying reduced relative clauses with both active and passive participles. Japanese teacher makes a sheet with pictures of people involved in various activities, with standard Q(&A exchange) thus: Who is the/that boy v-ing (...whatever)?

I notice, however, an "alternative" exponent (Who is the running boy?), and am not sure of what proportion of the total questions asked (in demonstration and/or uncontrolled/unmonitored student use) it will make up (end up making), so I make a note to query it with the Japanese teacher, and then start looking for (counter)examples.

I soon confirm my instinct that it sounds more like a kind of permanent state (which explains the enduring status of titles of works such as The Sleeping Beauty, The Running Man etc; and a pretty girl will probably grow into a Pretty Woman etc) by the fact that no attributive positions of running+"person/people" can be found in a search of the examples in my Oxford Advanced Learner's (6th edition) - versus compounds such as 'running shoes/track' and phrases like 'running water', 'long-running dispute' etc. I also consider things like *The playing basketball boy (*/?The basketball boy, versus 'waterboy', 'teaboy' etc. 'Running boy'?!).

I come to the conclusion that temporary actions are reflected (unsurprisingly) in the "verby" active participle coming after the (omitted relative) pronoun and BE (thus forming the main part of the ellipted "verb" phrase); then, there is the discoursally convincing nature of adding information progressively as necessary in an unfolding deictic (and/or syntactic!) process: Who is THAT (Eh?) BOY (Which boy?) TALKING to Mary (Ah, that's Bob) etc.

The Japanese teachers were unaware of the differing functions of the differing word orders, and had been teaching the attributive order as just another way of saying the predicative/reduced relative.

My only question then is, is the functional difference as clear-cut as I believe it is?

I don't like giving the impression to non-natives that communication will be too adversely affected by a slightly marked or unexpected word order, but equally, I don't like letting them use "equally valid alternatives" to express "more or less the same thing" all the time (or so it can sometimes seem, in Japan at least!).

[JuanTwoThree]

Mulling over this I came to a similar conclusion:

"Clothes for drinking men" men who habitually drink

"Clothes for men drinking" men who are drinking at that moment

So, yes, the second does seem to be ellipsis.


But then you have "There's a crying boy at the door" which seems to happening now, unlike "I saw the drinking vicar in the supermarket", and is similar to "There's a boy crying at the door" but avoids the confusion of the second with something similar to "crying at the moon" whereas "I saw the vicar drinking in the supermarket" is clearly "and he was".

Or more graphically "There's a weeing baby on the landing" vs "There's a baby weeing on the landing"

So, very tentatively, apart from the simple/continuous business of "men who drink" versus "men who are drinking" it does seem possible to put that -ing in the "before"position when it is "happening now" and this has something to do with getting it away from that preposition afterwards.

There's also something going on with hyphenation in the before position: a basketball-playing boy or a whisky-drinking policeman, in order to block the sense-units correctly (though I'm sure that's not the correct jargon) as in "a man eating fish" but "a man-eating fish".

[fluffyhamster]

Well, people don't usually cry AT (=to) doors (in the belief that the door rather than a person behind the door will hear the crying and perhaps open it(self!) to see what all the crying is about), so it would seem 'There's a boy crying at the door' would not be interpreted any differently from 'There's a crying boy at the door'; and in any case, we could just say 'outside'. Me, I still think 'There's a boy crying outside' sounds more natural than 'There's a crying boy outside'.

As for your vicar examples, I noticed we've changed from indefinite to definite reference (and past tense): there is obviously a difference between 'I saw the vicar drinking...' (for perhaps the/his first time ever) and 'I saw the vicar who drinks/The "drinking" vicar...'; again, the attributive word order would seem odd when you consider 'I saw a vicar drinking' versus ?'I saw a drinking vicar' (could our problems here be traceable back to an older form, of English? I saw a vicar adrinking? Only joking LOL).

Hyphenated modifiers come only before the noun and seem to serve purely a perpertual "identifying" function, not an 'in progress' referential/deictic function, though I'll grant that 'Who is that beer-swilling policeman/beer-swilling, basketball-playing boy superstar?' might be possible in certain neighbourhoods or schools.

[JuanTwoThree]

Thinking aloud:

OK. The boy crying was not the best example.

I don't think the past and/or definite article changes anything. The diifference between "I see a vicar drinking/drinking vicar" is no different from "I saw the drinking vicar/ vicar drinking" . Either way it serves to support the neat idea that pre- modification is to describe a permanent attribute and post- some kind of ellipsed continuous, be it present or past. It would be a nice rule.

All well and good, but the weeing boy is fairly convincing: The post-modification is clearly "real time" but the pre-modification is not necessarily a permanent attribute. And it may well have something to do with distancing itself from that "on the landing" . So bang seems to go an elegant theory.

Do you really think these hyphenated premodifiers are always perpetual and not sometimes "in progress"?

"He was hit by a fast-moving car" doesn't seem any different from "a car moving fast" and may even sound better.

So while the "after" position is clearly always "at the time" is it necessarily the case that "before" isn't?

Another:

"Did you see that falling log?" "Did you see that log falling?"

Although I have a little niggle about the two logs which would reinstate the elegant theory, but it's hard to explain: a "falling log" is a type of log, for a short time admittedly, but a "log falling" is a boring common-or-garden log that happens to be falling. The same might be said of the cars, at a stretch.

Leaving the incontinent child.

[fluffyhamster]

No prizes for guessing that my fast-improving posting rate is due to having got my net connection back at last (with a new ISP). Hurrah!

I was going to say 'It would seem that blah blah blah' regarding those pesky hyphenated modifiers, but I didn't want to make it sound like I didn't know what the hell I was talking about and hadn't been bothered to check up on anything. Anyway, glad you thought of a "counterexample".

Cars that hit people generally tend to be moving fast rather than slowly, so it makes sense that the modifier goes before the noun (although one could say that elegant though it is versus a post-noun modifier, it still sounds a bit cliched)...just chewing on the food you've offered for thought here, not criticizing or saying anything you've said is at all obvious, JTT!

So, cars that hit are bound to be "fast-moving" ones, but "weeing boys" would seem (note the hedging this time LOL) a much more unusual breed of noun phrase...I reckon the adjective interrupts (would interrupt) the deictic processes potentially involved too much and (as I've said) it is hardly a class of noun which we're going to be needing to enshrine with a more fixed (adj-n) word order anytime soon...besides which, I also like the notion of "target": 'weeing ON THE LANDING'. Thus: 'Did you see that boy peeing on the landing?' (versus: 'Did you see that weeing boy on the landing' - as if weeing on landings were a natural and perfectly acceptable thing for boys, albeit weeing ones, to do. You must live in a rough neighbourhood, JTT!). Whaddya think?

Perhaps we should give Chomsky a bell before he pops it and ask if there are any "deeper" propositions lurking here, such as 'The boy peed on the landing'. We could also ask him which of falling logs/logs falling would be more appropriate to describe those of the toilet rather than the common garden variety type (but that's not to say dogs don't drop logs on lawns from time to time).

[JuanTwoThree]

Yeah, it's tedious having to litter everything with "seems" and "perhaps" and "may" and "might" although I too find it's a useful shield when I haven't (might not have) the slightest idea what I'm (possibly) talking about.

[fluffyhamster]

[fluffyhamster]

Some "interesting" examples here:
http://www.geocities.co.jp/NeverLand-Ho ... 3/easy.htm

(You might have problems displaying it if your PC isn't equipped to handle Chinese or Japanese characters?).

[JuanTwoThree]

I don't see the problem. Only yesterday I said "The wolf ran across the sand". I was describing what I had seen on the beach at San Sebastian*

And I'll have you know that my family only has one pair of sunglasses between us so I hear "He is wearing the sunglasses" frequently.

"The man is looking at the computer screen. It is your desk. He decides to go. You are happy. The pie tastes good."

It's a tiny credible human drama that often takes place when you come back from McDonalds with one of those pies that take about three hours to cool down unless you want a cinnamony napalm burn on your chin. Only to find a co-worker has usurped your workstation.

As for the rest, I'm sure that given time (though perhaps in some cases a lot) I could come up with convincing contexts for the other examples, such as my Barbie collecting cousin. As you know my hobby is to walk and when I see a model she hasn't got I buy her a doll.

* I have lived there for ten years.

[fluffyhamster]

I didn't say they were exactly problems...it's just, I wonder who it is who's collating these lists of predominantly Simple present, very simple sentences...could it be John Sinclair?

Nah, what was I thinking, it's probably "Buffalo Bill", back from the dead and now running a flourishing side-line in "leather-bound" dictionaries and study aids. /

You could try a career in D&D/Fighting Fantasy-style gamebooks if the teaching job ever falls through, JTT.

[fluffyhamster]

But seriously, it would be beyond students to come up with such imaginative contexts that begin making sense of the disparate (and, note, separate) sentences (and who said anything about needing to combine the mothers, impressive, resourceful and imaginative though that feat is? You obviously have too much time on your hands, JTT! First it was long walks, then playing with dolls, and now this! LOL)...which is all my way of implying that the single (isolated?) sentences that we give students ought to be a lot better (more "evincing", more "evocative"...not quite sure how to describe).

That being said, the odd bit of oddness, the occassional oddity, can serve as a catalyst (uh oh, any more talk like that and I'll be sharing a cell with Mario Rinvoludicrous at Pilgrims Asylum before long. See you there, JTT!).

Good meaty-yet-managebale in the mouth (as a model of and for speaking) sentences (should, and by and large do) evoke a context (probably/hopefully the original) even when taken out of (that original, possibly wider/longer) context.