| In recent years, interest in functional approaches to the study of relative clauses has emerged as part of the need to understand the use of this grammatical device in discourse. However, little detailed work has focused on information structure of relative clauses within academic texts, including scientific and ESP materials. Thus, the present study aims at investigating how the English relative clause can be used to convey given/new information in three discourse types, namely, narrative, scientific, and ESP materials. It also examines its contribution to the flow of information in discourse.; The data for this study are 600 relative clauses: 200 relative clauses were selected from each of three written discourse types. The general framework for this research is on Functional Sentence Perspective, as well as several others, which include Beaman's (1984) information-bearing (new) and identificatory (given), and Desinger and Touplin's (1994) discourse functions of relative clauses. The linguistic data from the three genres were analyzed by using a quantitative method, namely, the Chi-square Test of Association, which also involve a functional analysis of the distribution of relative clause patterns.; Results obtained from this study confirm an expectation that scientific and ESP texts, both within the expository scientific genre, differ from narrative texts in their own respect. For example, while scientific and ESP materials reveal a great tendency of using given information in the relative clause, the writers of narrative texts are likely to use the same type of subordinate clause to carry new information. This study also reveals that new information in the relative clause is preferred at the end of the sentence in the three genres. On the other hand, given information tends to occur in the subject/topic position of the main clause in scientific and ESP texts, but not so in narrative texts, where there is a preference for given information to appear after the final element of the main clause.; The kind of discourse analysis with a focus on functional perspectives has applications for EFL/ESP pedagogy, including textbook development, classroom instruction, and teacher-student interaction. |
