Word Order And Discourse Grammar: A Contrative Analysis Of Relative Clauses In Chinese And English

A contrastive analysis is made of relative clauses between Japanese and English by Yoko Maria Francisca Collier-Sanuki, who noticed two prominent differences between English and Japanese. First, RCs are generally used in written narratives about 1.5 times more frequently in Japanese than in English. Second, the use of RC in two languages often does not coincide. Based on these findings, she hypothesized and proved that the different word orders and principles that govern respective languages are responsible for the language–specific functions and peculiar uses of relative clauses in the two languages, namely they affect the human cognition process at a very basic level, and determine the frequencies and types of RCs and their discourse functions.In this thesis, I made a comprehensive discourse analysis of Chinese RCs in contrast with those of English to test Collier-Sanuki's hypothesis. I hypothesize that the differences or similarities in the word order of relative clauses and their head nouns of relative clause positions in the matrix sentence in relation to the position of other main-clause elements such as subjects, verbs and prepositional phrases, will determine their usage and functions particular to each language. There are two main features in the word orders concerning the RCs: One is the position between relatives and their head nouns, Chinese language is left-branching, while English is right-branching, that is, in Chinese, relative clause precedes its head noun, while in English it follows the head noun; the other is the basic word order of Chinese and English. Both languages are basically SVO ordered. Following data analysis proves that the discrepancies in RC frequency and functions can be accounted for mainly through the co-effect of word order and language-specific rules. Besides, word order also accounts for the differences in relative clause patterning.The result of the contrastive analysis of RCs between Chinese and English together with Collier-Sanuki's findings demonstrates how the processing of relative clauses are determined by the mechanisms of word order and some language-specific rules.