A Study Of Chinese Learners’ Acquisition Of Non-restrictive Relative Clauses From The Perspective Of Linguistic Typology

Relativization,as an embedded structure to realize the recursion in human languages,has always caught the attention in research,for it is both universal and language specific.While the English language can take both pre-modifiers and post-modifiers,with relative clauses as a kind of post-modifier,the Chinese language only allows for pre-modifiers.Due to the great discrepancy in the English and Chinese languages,the acquisition of English relative clauses by Chinese English learners has been widely recognized as a challenging task.It is especially the case with the acquisition of non-restrictive relative clauses—an important grammatical parameter in English.This research aims to explore this area with an integrated approach—a combination of interview and corpus data.25 subjects took part in the interview with the judgment checks and in-depth interactions to test their differentiation of non-restrictive relative clauses.From two sub-corpora—ST-5 and ST-6 in CLEC,634 non-restrictive relative clauses are retrieved as the research samples of relative clauses.These samples are analyzed from the perspectives of relative pronouns,subject or object extractions.The sentential relative clauses,a special type of relative structure,are also analyzed from the perspective of linguistic typology.The findings are as follows: 1)according to the interview results,Chinese learners generally underperform in the differentiation of non-restrictive relative clauses from the restrictive counterparts.And the criteria they depend on are rather rigid;2)according to the corpus samples,the relative structures with “which” as the relative pronoun accounts for the largest proportion.The relative clauses with “which”,“who” and “whose” conform to the processing difficulty proposed by SOHH: OS>SS/OO>SO.3)the investigation of sentential relative clauses is a key part of this research.The major findings here include the relatively high frequency of sentential relative clauses,the incorrect semantic connection with the matrix sentence.On the basis of the findings mentioned above,pedagogical suggestions are also put forward.It is hoped that the findings in this research can shed some light in the acquisition of non-restrictive relative clauses of the Chinese English learners.