Help me...
 

I'm having a hard time figuring out what the following grammar is...help me, please!

"I can't tell where my house was."

"It's a festival held in the fall."

These are example sentences from a JHS textbook I'm trying to dissect.

My brain is frazzled...

Re: Help me...
 

"I can't tell where my house was."

This is an embedded question.

"It's a festival held in the fall."

This is a reduced relative clause.

Re: Help me...
 

Are those actual grammar points, 'embedded question' and 'reduced relative clause'?

Sometimes I feel like I know something and other times I feel like a child...

Re: Help me...
 

That's what they're called in ESL teaching as far as I know.

Your 'where' question is a little tricky. There's also wh-relative clauses. Which is probably more correct for your example.

I didn't hear what you said.
He showed me where I should go.

Re: Help me...
 

So, what about this sentence? Would the bolded part be a reduced relative clause or be classified under gerund? Or, would the correct answer to my question be that there is a gerund inside of a reduced relative clause?

"The women wearing chima jeogori are making kimchi."

Re: Help me...
 

Mesmark,

After further research, I found out you were correct that my "where" sentence would be better classified as a relative clause. It's just that 'where' isn't one of the main relative pronouns.


Also, I found this out about embedded questions over at ESL GOLD website: "An embedded question is a part of a sentence that would be a question if it were on its own, but is not a question in the context of the sentence."

So, applying that meaning to my 'where' sentence, if I stripped everything from the sentence it would read, "where my house was" and that isn't a question, so naturally it would fall into the relative clause category.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction... :)

Re: Help me...
 

It is a reduced relative clause and the word 'wearing' is the present participle of 'wear'.

Whether it's the present participle or a gerund depends on whether it acts like a verb or adjective (present participle) or acts as a noun (gerund.)

Re: Help me...
 

Stripped down you'd still need to look at it in question form. "Where was my house?"

Then you'd need to dissern whether in the context, that was the question the speaker was asking, or whether the speaker was asking a question at all.

What I mean to say is, was it an indirect way of asking a question - - > embedded question
Where was my house

or information - -> relative clause
the place where my house was

Re: Help me...
 

I think I'm scarily catching on...

GEEK ALERT!! I'M UNDERSTANDING!! Man, I used to be so cool...

Thanks again, Mesmark!

Re: Help me...
 

Patrick,

I put together a grammar explanation on embedded questions at my site:

Embedded Questions | Heads Up English | ESL Lessons

Hope the info makes it a bit clearer.

Re: Help me...
 

Thanks, Hue! That page was very clear.