| The relative clause, as a universal linguistic phenomenon, has been a very important issue of linguistic studies for its unique syntactic structure, frequent usefulness and grammatical importance. In particular, great attention has been paid to the studies on the difficulty order of different relative clause types in the first language and second language acquisition of relative clauses. Based on different rationale, researchers have conducted various studies to discuss the factors that affect learners' processing difficulty. With regard to this issue, intra-linguistic factors (such as syntactic complexity and semantic factor) and extra-linguistic factors (such as working memory limitation and perspective shifting) are supposed to be responsible for different results in those researches.Although the processing difficulty of relative clause acquisition has been widely investigated, but up to now, no satisfactory result is obtained. First of all, among various researches concerning relative clause acquisition, few researches look into this issue from a multifactor perspective. Language comprehension and production are a complex process, which is subject to a variety of factors. Thus it is hard to get a full picture of the processing and acquisition of relative clauses if only one factor is involved. Secondly, as for methodological issue, written data are collected in most researches while oral data are often ruled out. And in the second language acquisition of relative clauses, production tasks are preferred over comprehension tasks. Thirdly, the learners'English proficiency level is rarely taken as a parameter in the investigation. We can not see whether there is any difference in the processing difficulty of different relative clause types by different levels of learners. Therefore, more researches are needed to be carried out concerning learners'processing difficulty of relative clause acquisition.To overcome the deficiencies in the previous studies, the present study, based on the previous findings, probes into Chinese learners'acquisition of English relative clauses by taking both intra-linguistic and extra-linguistic factors into consideration.This study is an empirical research, which consists of a corpus-based study and an experimental study. SWECCL (Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learner), which was developed by Wen et al. in 2005, is employed in the corpus-based study.45 Chinese students at different language proficiency levels participate in the experimental study. They are 15 high school students in Grade Two from Min Qing NO.1 High School in Fu Zhou city,15 non-English-major juniors and 15 English major juniors from Beijing Forestry University. Both elicitation test (the sentence completion test and the sentence combination test) and comprehension test (the sentence comprehension test) are used to collect data from the Chinese subjects. Data from the subjects are processed and analyzed via Predictive Analysis Software Statistics (PASW).Throughout the comparisons and discussions, the present study finds that multiple factors produce an effect on the difficulty order Chinese learners have when they process and acquire English relative clauses. Present results mainly report the effects of the syntactic complexity, animacy of nouns and working memory limitation on the learners'processing difficulty, which show greatly support for the hypotheses of the NPAH, the SOHH and the PDH. Besides, different tests types and English proficiency level are also proved to be the important factors that affect the Chinese learners'acquisition of English relative clauses.The findings of this study can enrich the literature of learners'acquisition of English relative clauses, which will ultimately benefit the teaching of English relative clauses in China. Textbook compilers can compile textbooks reasonably according to Chinese learners'processing difficulty. The students at different levels reflect the differences in the processing and acquisition of relative clauses, which can help English course teachers to design various classroom activities to reveal students'weak points in the acquisition process, so that they can select proper teaching materials and methods to help students proceed smoothly in the process of language maturity. |
