On The Role Of Accessibility And Animacy In The Acquisition Of Relative Clauses

Many a research on relative clauses in language acquisition has shown subject relative clauses are easier to process than object relative clauses;however,most of previous researches did not take the animacy of nouns within relative clauses into account.Considering accessibility and animacy,112 non-English majors production and comprehension abilities are accessed in the present study to investigate how they process subject relative clauses and direct object relative clauses.Through a grammaticality judgment test and a sentence completion test,it is shown that, animacy taken into consideration,subject relative clauses are easier to process than direct object relative clauses if the subject within relative clause is animate, regardless of comprehension or production of the clause.On the contrary,subject being inanimate,direct relative clauses are easier to process than subject relative clauses,which goes against the prediction of noun phrase accessibility hierarchy.To probe into the underlined reason,an optimality-theory-based method is adopted.It is proposed that both accessibility and animacy be taken as the constraints in processing relative clauses and animacy is regarded to be the higher ranking constraint,thus a contradictory result is obtained.