A Typological Study Of Relative Clauses

Relative clauses have been the hot topic of typological researches.The researches of relative clauses have four contents:1)categories;2)orders of relative clauses and other grammatical elements;3)relative strategies;4)motivations.The previous researches give great inspiration to this thesis,but they have some limitations.The limitations have three contents:1)the predecessor did not study whether the order had correlations with the categories of relative clauses,and also did not study the motivations of all categories of relative clauses on the whole;2)the predecessor did not study orders of relative clauses and other grammatical elements from the perspective of typology,and should not just consider English and Chinese.And there were many various motivations which the predecessor got.They need to be simplified and proved;3)the predecessor did not study the relative strategies which world languages preferred in different syntactic positions and also did not study the motivations.Therefore,from the perspective of typology,this thesis selects fourteen language samples including English and Chinese.They include VO,OV and VO-OV mixed orders.These three orders are all types in the world languages.The purpose is to study the correlations between the relative clause and the order based on categories,orders of relative clauses and other grammatical elements,and relative strategies.If there are correlations,what will be the motivation for this?If there is no correlation,what will be the motivation for this?The research methods in this study are based on the qualitative analyses,supplemented by the quantitative analyses.The research findings are as follows:?1?The order has no correlation with categories of relative clauses.The world languages prefer external relative clauses because of obvious domain and easy relativization.Navajo?OV?prefers internal relative clauses because there are no articles,quantifiers,relative pronouns,which meets the Economic Principle.Seediq?VO?,Tagalog?VO?and Navajo can have external and internal relative clauses at the same time because there are no articles,quantifiers,relative pronouns,making it equal to relativize in the external relative clauses.The world languages prefer free relative clauses because of the easiest relativization.Left-adjoined relative clauses do not exist,which should be called internal relative clauses in the left of sentence.The world languages prefer internal relative clauses because they meet the principle of the easiest relativization.However,right-adjoined relative clauses meet the Primary Predicate Prominence Principle.?2?The order has correlations with the orders of relative clauses and other grammatical elements.The Branching Direction Theory?BDT?proposed by Dryer cannot predict the orders of relative clauses and nouns in English and Chinese.The Constitute Recognized Domain?CRD?and Early Immediate Constitutes?EIC?proposed by Hawkins may together elaborate the order of relative clause and other grammatical elements in English,but fail to elaborate the order of relative clause and other grammatical elements in Japanese and Chinese.The Primary Predicate Prominence Principle is proposed to account for the order of relative clause and other grammatical elements in different word order languages,and the default match of grammatical elements with different degrees of identifiability may reveal why Chinese subject relatives prefer using the order“numeral-classifier-relative clause-noun”while object relatives prefer using the order“relative clause-numeral-classifier-noun”.The Predication Hierarchy with the Primary Predicate Prominence Principle as its core can predict that cross-linguistically the position of relative clause is correlated with VO-OV languages,while that of adjective is uncorrelated with VO-OV languages.?3?The order has correlations with relative strategies.The explanation of relative strategies by Filler-Gap Domain?FGD?and Lexical Domain?LD?is consistent with the facts.When VO,OV,and VO-OV languages relativize SU,DO and IO/OBL,they prefer adopting the gap.When VO languages relativize GEN_SU and GEN_DO,they prefer adopting the resumptive pronoun to avoid grammatical mistakes.When the VO-OV language relativizes GEN_SU,it prefers adopting the gap because the number of FGD nodes cannot meet the criteria for adopting the resumptive pronoun.When it relativizes GEN_DO,it prefers adopting the resumptive pronoun to avoid turning the noun phrase into a sentence.However,OV languages prefer adopting the gap when they relativize GEN_SU and GEN_DO,because the number of FGD nodes is too small.In summary,this thesis has the typological significance and application value.Firstly,relative clauses of those languages which have main orders are not related to the order based on the category,but have correlations with the order based on the orders of relative clauses and other grammatical elements and relative strategies,making up for the shortcomings of the previous studies.Secondly,it clarifies the correlation between English or Chinese relative clauses and orders,and provides theoretical guidance for the language teaching and learning of English and Chinese,which makes learners connect relative clauses with the order when mastering them.