Difficulty Order Of English Relative Clause Production

Relative clause, as a universal linguistic phenomenon, has drawn much attention in the field of language acquisition due to its unique syntactic property and its frequency and usefulness in the daily communication. Research on its acquisition difficulty mainly focuses on two aspects: the first one is the functions the head noun serves in the sub-clause, reflected by different RC types, i.e., SU, DO, OPREP, GEN and OCOMP; the second one is the embeddedness of a relative clause, manifested by two positions, i.e., the subject position in matrix and the object one. Researchers have proposed many hypotheses and explanations with regard to this issue. Various factors are supposed to account for different results in those researches. In sum, the present study mainly focus on such factors as typological markedness, syntactic complexity, working memory limitation, filler-gap distance, perspective shifting, information flow, semantic factor and negative transfer of native language.In spite of various investigations of the issue from various perspectives by researches abroad, no satisfactory explanation is achieved. On one hand, it may be, due to the fact that language comprehension and production are subject to a variety of constraints, whereas, most explanations are based only on one single rationale irrespective of any others. On the other hand, those studies focus only on the several common RC patterns while paying little attention to others. Additionally, the factor of interaction of RC type and its position in matrix is often ignored. Furthermore, the learners' proficiency levels are seldom considered in this field. The present research, based on the previous findings, aims at making a complementary investigation into the issue by doing a research on Chinese EFL learners at three language proficiency levels. In this study, a sentence combination test is used to collect data, which are then submitted to statistical analysis so as to get an idea about the relative difficulty of various RC sentence patterns and to dig out what effects the RC type and matrix position have on the production of relative clause. Besides, the results of the present research are examined against the previous hypotheses so that a deep and thorough understanding is obtained. The main findings in present study are as follows:First, despite the different proficiency levels, the results in three groups, (group of seniors in high school, group of sophomores of non-English major, and group of undergraduates of English major) are almost consistent with each other in the difficulty order in terms of five RC types. The only difference is the change in the order of SU and GEN in the third group. And in spite of the comparatively syntactic complexity of GEN and OPREP over SU and DO, the former two RC types are shown to be easier to process than the latter ones. This indicates that the acquisition difficulties of different RC types are not completely determined by their syntactic complexities. The perceptual saliency and the learners' linguistic experience play important roles.Second, when the five RC types are embedded into two matrix positions, the difficulty orders of three groups are consistent only in terms of some sentence patterns. Throughout the statistic analysis, we find RC type and matrix position have significant influence on three groups, yet their interaction does not significant influence on the latter two groups which are supposed to be at higher proficiency levels. Besides, the results in present study are not consistent with the previous ones at different levels. A unitary factor or hypothesis is not accountable enough to clarify these differences. It indicates there are multiple constraints playing roles and they may hierarchically or simultaneously come to play in the process of production of relative clauses.Throughout the comparisons and discussions, the present study find that Chinese EFL learners' difficulty orders in production of relative clause are influenced by multiple constraints which could come to play hierarchically and simultaneously. As far as the author is concerned, present results are mainly attributed to the syntactic complexity and working memory limitation. Besides, different language proficiency could influence learners' language experience and processing strategies, which could cause different difficulty order concerning this issue.