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I just ran into this in the novel "Pride and Prejudice"

-"Ah! you do not know what I suffer." -"But I hope you will get over it, and live to see many young men of four thousand a year come into the neighbourhood.'' -``It will be no use to us if twenty such should come, since you will not visit them.''

  1. The occurrence of "such" here is interesting to me. Is it a pronoun here which is brought instead of "young men of four thousand a year"?
  2. What is the deep structure of the noun phrase of the if-clause? the surface structure is "twenty such". Is the deep structure "twenty young men who are of 4 thousand a year"?
  3. When a Reduction Transformation is possible which is better to be used? for example, is it better to say "a man who is of large fortune" or "a man of large fortune"? Any links elaborating on the Reduction Transformations in English would be truly appreciated. As far as I know, there are six RTs. But I need a trustworthy reference for my further studying.
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  • Welcome to the site! 1. Yes. 2. Yes. 3. I see no reason to add "who is", but I don't know about "reduction transformations".
    – Cerberus
    Dec 24, 2013 at 12:44
  • @user43947 It seems likely to me that your example involves NP-ellipsis of men following such, given that twenty such men is independently attested. An ellipsis analysis allows us to give a uniform analysis of such, rather than analysing it as ambiguous between a pronoun and some sort of determiner. The underlying representation for your example would be: It will be no use to us if [twenty such <[NP men]>].... Incidentally, does reduction transformation mean the same thing as ellipsis? I'm not so familiar with the older transformational terminology.
    – P Elliott
    Dec 24, 2013 at 16:03
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    Ellipsis is classic terminology and non-specific as to source, effect, or context. Reduction and deletion are terms used in several varieties of generative syntax, generally as names of specific rules that can be argued to represent deletions (or gaps, or empty nodes, or many other terms).
    – jlawler
    Dec 24, 2013 at 21:05
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    Generally what is missing is either repeated material in one way or another (Conjunction Reduction, Equi-NP-Deletion), indefinite NP arguments, like the subjects of the gerunds in Seeing is believing, or predictable meaningless syntactic particles, like Whiz-Deletion.
    – jlawler
    Dec 24, 2013 at 21:07

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