In linguistics, whiz deletion is a form of ellipsis common in the English language in which a relative pronoun and a form of the verb “to be” are both deleted.
The term “whiz deletion” is a portmanteau pun stemming from the fact that several of the relative pronouns in English start with “wh-“ and from the is form of “to be.”[1]: 145 Whiz deletion is analyzed by Langendoen as a transformational reduction of relative clauses[1]: 145–147 [2] that—together with another transformation, which moves adjectives in front of the noun phrases they modify—explains many occurrences of attributive adjectives.
On this analysis, for example, whiz deletion transforms the sentence into And then the fact that the deletion left behind a bare adjective (namely, faulty) triggers the adjective-preposing transformation, which produces the final (surface) form The notion that the process of whiz deletion is the correct explanation for the surface structures in question has been disputed.
Williams argues,[3] for instance, that it fails to address the difference between which whiz deletion would produce from and which would have to come from the non grammatical