A Typology-based Study Of Second Language Acquisition In English Relative Clause

A relative clause is one of the most important grammatical structures in English teaching and learning, and has played a crucial role in linguistic research. Due to its unique syntactic properties, English relative clause (RC) has attracted considerable attention from linguists both at home and abroad since1970s. Many linguists have conducted numerous researches on how second language learners acquire English relative clauses from various perspectives, such as Universal Grammar and native language transfer and fruitful research results have been obtained. One of the most influential theories is Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH, also abbreviated as AH) proposed by Keenan and Comrie (1977). As a grammatical hierarchy based on cross-linguistic comparisons, NPAH reveals implicational constraints of relative clause formation across languages, and has become very influential in its application in relative clause acquisition, especially in the field of second language acquisition.This study aims to investigate the acquisition order of English relative clauses by Chinese learners. In this research, we carried out an empirical study and attempted to answer the following three key research questions:1) To what extent do the results support the prediction of NPAH?2) Does the animacy of noun phrases affect Chinese learners’production of relative clauses?3) What role does the passive structure play in relation to the acquisition of different types of English relative clauses?We designed a questionnaire consisting of a sentence combination task and a grammatical judgment task. The sentence combination task has32pairs of simple sentences representing eight types of RCs, and every type is tested via4pairs with an animate head noun in2pairs and an inanimate head noun in the other2pairs. The grammaticality judgment task consists of16correct sentences and18incorrect ones; the former stand for four types of relative clauses (SU, DO, OBL and GEN), and the latter for four types of errors in RC formation, i.e., pronoun retention, misuse of relative pronouns, non-adjacency and omission of compulsory relative pronouns. All the grammatical and ungrammatical test items are scrambled and arranged randomly. The participants involved in this study are72English majors from the College of Foreign Languages in Qingdao University.The results of the study are summarized as follows:1) the acquisition order of English relative clauses for Chinese learners is largely consistent with the prediction of NPAH;2) the animacy of noun phrases has an important effect on Chinese learners’ acquisition of English RCs. DO and OBL relative clause with an animate head noun are more difficult for Chinese learners to acquire than those with an inanimate head noun;3) In the sentence combination task, many passive structures occur in the production of DO and OBL RCs. Although the production of GEN RCs registered a higher correct rate than DO and OBL RCs, it was mainly due to the fact a large number of passive structures were used in the latter. This result is consistent with the finding regarding animacy of noun phrases in the related literature that animate antecedents show a greater tendency to function as the subject, whereas inanimate antecedents often take the syntactic role of object. Therefore, when many participants are expected to relativize on DO or OBL position, they tended to relativize on SU position instead, which shows the subject primacy in relativization on the one hand, and the function of animacy as an important affecting factor in RC acquisition on the other.The findings of this research bear implications to L2learning and teaching. The teaching and learning of English relative clauses may take into account the predictions of linguistic universals such as the NPAH. Teachers should pay more attention to the RC types which cause frequent errors and give more diagnostic instruction to help the students have a better knowledge of the properties of RCs and to avoid making errors. This study investigated the L2learners’ behavior on the acquisition of English RCs from the typological perspective, which is anticipated to make substantial contributions to the further understanding of RC acquisition and to provide food for thought for further in-depth research along this line.