WHIZBG Present participial WHIZ deletions

Biber H28 child of VBG

Definition

Reduced relative clauses with deleted “which/who + be” before a present participle.

Parent

VBG

Detection Rules

Present participle as adjectival clause modifier of a noun. Distinguishes WHIZ deletion from free participial clause.

semgrex{pos:VBG}=part <acl {pos:/NN.*/}=noun

Requires: pos, dep

pybiber

pybiber requires VBG with dep_rel==“acl” AND the PREVIOUS token to be a NOUN (UPOS). This adjacency check is more restrictive than the semgrex approach, which allows non-adjacent noun heads.

cql[upos="NOUN"] [pos="VBG" & dep="acl"]

Requires: pos, upos, dep

Anchor: last

Normalization

Per finite_verbs

Examples

the man standing there

i.e., “the man [who is] standing there”

a light shining in the east

i.e., “a light [that was] shining in the east”

Sources

  • biber_1988 — Biber, Douglas (1988) : Variation across Speech and Writing
  • pybiber — Brown, David West & Reinhart, Alex (2026) : pybiber — Python package for linguistic feature extraction and Multi-Dimensional Analysis

Notes

Not listed separately in Biber’s dimension loadings. Less common than past participial WHIZ deletions.

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