Discourse Functions Of English Restrictive Relative Clauses

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. Some Japanese scholars have done related research in English restrictive relative clauses by Japanese users. However, there has been little work done focusing on the Chinese college students' use of restrictive relative clauses in the academic texts.In previous studies of English relative clauses, linguists focused on the syntactic and semantic functions of English relative clauses. Keenan and Comrie (1977), two of the most famous linguists who have studied English relative clauses, state that any syntactic construction can be a relative clause if it specifies a set of objects:a large set of objects serving as the domain of relativization is restricted by a syntactic construction. This type of syntactic constructions is called relative clauses. According to Keenan and Comrie, the main function of English restrictive relatives is to delimit the domain of head NPs.Later than Keenan and Comrie, studies on relative clauses have focused on the explanation of English relative clauses from discourse perspectives. Scholars such as Prince, Fox, Thompson and Givon apply the notion "information flow" to explain how English relative clauses perform their discourse functions in conversation. They state that there are two major functions of restrictive relative clauses, namely grounding and description.The previous study research on discourse functions of English restrictive relative clauses tend to focus on spontaneous conversations and narration styles. Not enough work has been done on the discourse functions of English restrictive relative clauses in written data. The purpose of the present study, thus, is to investigate the discourse functions of English restrictive relative clauses in written expositions and arguments by native speakers of English. Particularly, this paper tries to investigate the relationship between the discourse functions of English restrictive relative clauses and their occurrences in discourse units. Therefore, this paper's analysis includes considerations from four dimensions:syntax, semantics, pragmatics and discourse. And English restrictive relative clauses are classified into three syntactic types: S-relatives, A-relatives and O-relatives. It is discovered that the majority of English restrictive relative clauses occur in the beginning position of discourse units. And they serve two functions. One is to serve as a device to introduce their new head NPs as the topics in the following discourse when occurring in such a position.Therefore, it is concluded that the main purpose of using a restrictive clause is to introduce a new head NP as the topic when the new referent is mentioned for the first time in a new discourse unit. The other function is to serve as a device to provide new information about the head noun it is described for so as to form coherence of the whole written texts.Also this paper examines English restrictive relative clauses in the thesis writing by English major students in their master graduation paper to see if the elements found in native speakers' writings are also efficiently expressed in Chinese students' writing. It is found that graduate students have not fully employed the functions of English restrictive relative clauses in their writing. Even though most of RRCs occur in the beginning positions of discourse units in the students' writings, RRCs in such a position are not used to serve as a strategy to develop the new head NPs as the topics in the following discourse. Thus, it seems that the college students only make use of RRCs to perform grounding function and take RRCs as a medium to narrow the scope of head NPs rather than use them to introduce new head NPs for further development.According to the findings of this paper, the writer recommends students of English majors to learn the discourse functions of English restrictive relative clauses. Discourse-based application should be used in teaching methods. Teachers can provide discourse-oriented examples in class to teach students discourse functions of English restrictive relatives.This thesis is composed of six chapters. Chapter One is the introduction of the motivation, purpose and organization of the thesis. Chapter Two takes an all-round review of the theories concerning English restrictive relative clauses, including syntactic-semantic aspects of restrictive relative Clause, accessibility hierarchy of restrictive relative clause proposed by Keenan & Comie, information status in restrictive relative clause proposed by Fox and Thompson. Chapter Three is a close analysis of English restrictive relative clause used by native speakers. This part will be conducted in the order of different syntactic types of the restrictive relative clauses with the different occurrence in discourse units. Chapter Four follows the same order of Chapter Three but analyses the Chinese English major graduate students' data. Chapter Five is the preliminary analysis of the reasons of the deficiency of Chinese students' use of English restrictive relatives from the perspective of Schachter's theory and Doughty's theory. Chapter Six is the conclusion of the thesis and from the research in this thesis the author proposes that discourse based teaching method should be applied in the teaching process and students be taught to bring the discourse functions of English restrictive relative clauses into full play so as to make them work better as grounding and description devices.