Preventing Make from "expanding" a variable ?

[Frazer Worley]

We work in configuration management areas which is identifed using the $WORKSPACE 
environment variable. 

  eg WORKSPACE= /prj/qct/qctps/eng_dev/workspaces/fworley/devel/axi_ws

All files specified in the Makefile are thus relative to $WORKSPACE.

      SCRATCH_DIR= ${WORKSPACE}/scratch/${USER}

Under a workspace there can be several levels of subdirectories and the paths can become distractingly 
long and lead to very noisy looking output from the commands invoked by Make.

It would be preferable if the $WORKSPACE variable were not expanded by Make 

  eg. $WORKSPACE/scratch/fworley/modelsim/one_trans.vr

  and not /prj/qct/qctps/eng_dev/workspaces/fworley/devel/axi_ws/scratch/fworley/modelsim/one_trans.vr

Can somebody suggest a simple/low impact means to achieving this ? Will such a scheme break 
the dependency checks ? Are there other side effects I should be aware of ? 

I'm trying to get clearer, more readily understood by users, workspace relative pathnames from Make

Thanks,

-Frazer