Empirical Research On Chinese Learners' Comprehension And Production Of English Relative Clauses

Relative clause, as a universal linguistic phenomenon, has drawn much attention in the field of language acquisition due to its unique syntactic property and its frequency and usefulness in our daily communication. Research on its acquisition difficulty mainly focuses on two aspects: the first one is the functions the head noun serves in the sub-clause, reflected by different RC types, i.e., SU, DO, IO, OPREP, GEN and OCOMP; the second one is the embeddedness of a relative clause, manifested by two positions, i.e., the matrix subject position and the matrix object position. In spite of a variety of investigations of the issue from various perspectives by researchers abroad, no satisfactory explanation is achieved. On one hand, it may be due to the fact that language comprehension and production are subject to a variety of constraints, whereas, most explanations are based only on one single rationale irrespective of any others. On the other hand, those studies focus only on the several common RC patterns while paying little attention to the others. At home, little consideration is given to the field. Let alone a deep and thorough study. The present research, based on the previous findings, aims to make a complete investigation into the issue by doing experiments on Chinese learners of English as a foreign language. In this study, a comprehension test as well as production test are used to collect data, which are then submitted to statistical analysis so as to get an idea about the relative difficulty of various RC sentences and to dig out what effects the RC type and matrix position have on the comprehension and production of a relative clause. What's more, the results of the present research are examined against the previous hypotheses so that a deep and thorough understanding of the comprehension and production of the English relative clauses is obtained. The main findings are:Firstly, in spite of the comparatively syntactic complexity of GEN and OPREP over SU and DO, the former two RC types are shown to be easier to process than the latter two respectively in both of the two tests. This indicates that the acquisition difficulties of different RC types are not completely determined by their syntactic complexities. The perceptual saliency of the relative pronoun "whose" and the learners linguistic experience are, in effect, play important roles. Secondly, in the comprehension task, the processing difficulties of relative sentences are determined by the embeddedness but not by the differences of RC types. This is argued to be due to the fact that sentence comprehension does not desperately rely on the structure of a sentence, but on the lexical information and the learner's world knowledge. In production task, RC types manifested their effects globally while the effects of embeddedness manifested themselves only within each RC type. This result indicates that...