96501
Say I have a sentence that says "遠くに町の灯が瞬いていた", that is, "the lights of the
town were twinkling in the distance". Is my understanding correct, that if I
instead want to construct the clause "the lights of the town (that are)
twinkling in the distance", I would then just move the subject to the end of
the sentence (and change the grammatical tense), as I have done below:

> 遠くに町の灯が瞬いていた

Becomes:

> 遠くに瞬いている街の灯

Or do I, by doing this, break the grammar somewhere I haven't been able to
tell?
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2022-10-05T18:37:07.113
96498
2022-10-06T04:43:14.350
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question
grammar
Is 遠くに瞬いている街の灯 a correct clause?
Generally yes, that is how one can construct a noun phrase from a sentence
although tense/aspect may require different considerations for each verb.

> 猫がにゃーにゃー鳴いていた The cats were meowing  
>  にゃーにゃー鳴いている猫 The meowing cats

* * *

Consider

> 太郎は花子が好きだった Taro liked Hanako

Applying the same construction, we get

> 花子が好きな太郎

This is ambiguous between "Taro who likes Hanako" and "Taro whom Hanako
likes".

* * *

Another example:

> 花瓶が割れた The vase was broken

割れる花瓶 is not possible (or means an object that works as a vase and has
separable parts). "A broken vase" is always 割れた花瓶.
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2022-10-05T22:31:23.293
96501
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answer
遠くに瞬いている街の灯 is a perfectly correct phrase that means "the lights of the town
twinkling in the distance". But note that, strictly speaking, this is not a
clause, but a (noun) phrase that _contains_ a (relative) clause.

You may be worried that 瞬いている might modify only 街 (i.e., "the town that is
twinkling"), but you don't have to worry about this. When we look at the
English version, we understand "twinkling" modifies not just "the town" but
"the lights of the town" even without thinking, and that's because we know a
town itself doesn't twinkle. Likewise, also in Japanese, everyone understands
瞬いている modifies not just 街 but 街の灯 as a whole.

Related: [Are Japanese modifiers "greedy", "anti-greedy", or do they mean
whatever people choose them to
mean?](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/46817/5010)
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2022-10-06T04:43:14.350
96506
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5010
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answer