Investigation Of The Null-preposition Phenomenon In English Relative Clauses

It is widely supported that it is difficult and always at a later stage for ESL and EFL learners to master relative clauses. And the two key constructions in relative clauses are accepted to be preposition-stranding (PS) and preposition pied-piping (PiP) which might give rise to the phenomenon of null-preposition (null-prep). According to previous studies, L1 learners do not appear to be involved in the phenomenon of null-preposition while acquiring relative clauses, but for ESL and EFL learners, the null-prep has become common. This has led vast discussions and researches aiming to investigate the status, cause and effect of the null-prep phenomenon.Although the null-prep phenomenon has been identified in some EFL contexts (e.g. Japan in and Iran), it lacked an in-depth investigation in the context of China. No agreement has been concluded on the cause of null-prep as well.This study was designed specifically to investigate the phenomenon of null-preposition (null-prep) in relative clauses (RCs) by EFL Chinese learners, to analyze the relations and developmental order of null-prep, PS, and PiP. Discussions about the cause of null-prep are given based on the experimental results and previous studies.In the study,127 students divided into three proficiency levels were involved. They were asked to judge the grammaticality of three kinds of sentences:null-prep, PS, and PiP questions and RCs. Though Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) has been commonly used, it does have limitation. Thus, weighing the deficiencies in previous studies, the present study suggests another perspective, processing, to consider the developmental order. DMDX software is adopted to design a Self-paced Reading Task. If we can pin down how L2 learners parse the three structures, the evidence can inform us the difficulty they encounter, determining their developmental order.The results show that Chinese EFL learners across the three levels-beginning, intermediate and advanced, committed the error of receiving null-preposition, and that the instances of null-preposition decrease as participants'proficiency increased. Among the three constructions, null-preps are the easiest for Chinese EFL learners to process while PiPs are the hardest.Based on the results of this research and previous studies, this study has made a comprehensive analysis of the cause of null-prep. This study, unlike previous studies claiming that markedness or input salience accounted for the developmental order, proposed that the syntactic difficulty in the target language could serve as a forceful indicator, considering that difficult morphological items are acquired in a later stage. The results were consistent with those in previous studies showing that the developmental orders of null-prep, PiP, and PS in RCs were:null-prep, PS, PiP. As a result, null-prep constructions are easiest among the three for Chinese EFL learners to acquire, together with L1 transfer, it may contribute to the fossilization of null-prep preventing further acquisition of PS and PiP. In other words, L1 transfer does exert an influence on the acquisition of prepositional verbs, Chinese EFL learners fail to notice the structural differences of prepositional verbs between English and Chinese.Based on the results, pedagogical implications on the conception of input enhancement and cultivation of strategies in reading etc., and further study suggestions on fossilization, L1 transfer, and L2 children etc. were proposed at the end of the thesis.