WHIZBN Past participial WHIZ deletions

Biber H27 Xiao J90 child of VBN

Definition

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

Parent

VBN

Detection Rules

Past participle as adjectival clause modifier of a noun. Distinguishes WHIZ deletion from free participial clause (which modifies a verb/clause).

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

Requires: pos, dep

pybiber

VBN with dep acl immediately following a noun (coarse POS). pybiber uses adjacency rather than dependency head — the noun must be the token directly before the participle.

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

Requires: pos, upos, dep

Normalization

Per finite_verbs

Examples

the man killed

i.e., “the man [who was] killed”

the book written by Tolkien

i.e., “the book [that was] written by Tolkien”

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
  • xiao_2009 — Xiao, Richard (2009) : Multidimensional analysis and the study of world Englishes

Notes

D5 loading .40. Reduced relatives are more informationally dense than full relatives — contributes to abstract style.

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