The question here was moved to ELL:
It is about grammatical analysis not English language learning. Why was it moved? I don't understand.
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2I have just now personally asked each of the three closers to please provide the explanation you've requested of them here in this meta-question's own answer box.– tchrist ModCommented Nov 17 at 17:10
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2 Answers
I thought the question/grammatical point is one that would be covered in an intermediate ESL course. I assumed, judging from the OP's name, Penguin Learning, and the link provided, that this was student of English. I taught ESL for many years, and I wouldn't know how to do that without at least some grammatical analysis (sometimes even based on a comparison with the learner's native language).
Are we saying that questions on ELL can't be about grammar, or that this particular grammatical point is too advanced?
I believe I was the first close/migration vote. I thought that if I was wrong about the appropriateness of migration, there simply wouldn't be any additional migration votes. I didn't do any question searching on either site, but simple felt this was a basic feature of relative clauses. If, as Edwin points out, this point has been covered on ELU many times, then perhaps the close reason should be duplication rather than migration.
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1The question is not what an English language learner would cover, it is why it is an unsuitable question for a native speaker to ask. Commented Nov 17 at 22:13
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@Araucaria-Him It isn't unsuitable if a native speaker doesn't understand it, but I can only see that happening if, for some reason, they misread it, i.e., don't parse it properly--incorrect parsing sometimes happens to me. Commented Nov 17 at 23:01
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1You seem to be implying that their not understanding how it is structured (it's syntax) must be caused by an inability to read or understand it. This does not follow in any way shape of form. Commented Nov 18 at 13:07
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@Araucaria-Him Then please explain the reason for the OP's difficulty in understanding the sentence. Commented Nov 18 at 14:11
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1@DjinTonic, it is not obvious from the question that its poster had any 'difficulty in understanding the sentence'; the poster's difficulty seemed to have concerned the grammatical classification of the clause.– jsw29Commented Nov 18 at 21:10
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@jsw29 I disagree completely. The poster mentioned and considered a relative clause, but ruled it out because they were flummoxed by the inclusion of the word today. In my comment on the migrated page, I pointed out the several contextual clues they evidently missed in the full article the OP linked. I don't know how familiar the OP was familiar with that-deletion, but I think they wouldn't have questioned the clause structure had they fully understood the sentence in context, which contrasts Shanghai then and Shanghai today. Commented Nov 18 at 22:03
'... the ultramodern megalopolis it is today ...'
Here, 'it is today' is clearly a that-deleted form of the relative clause 'that it is today'; 'voting to close as the question is predicated on a misconception' seems harsh, but relative clauses are reasonably basic (and have been covered many times on ELU).
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'I think it is not a relative clause, right?' ... Incorrect. Relative clauses are reasonably basic, as are that-deleted variants with restrictive ones. This does answer the question 'Why did you vote to migrate?' I could have CV'd on 'question is predicated on a misconception', or duplicate ['The man that we met yesterday was a sales representative. The man Ø we met yesterday was a sales representative.'; JL] grounds; this seemed more user-friendly. Commented Nov 17 at 23:27