The Acquisition Of English Relative Clause By English Majors In China

As a universal linguistic phenomenon, relative clauses have drawn much attentionin the field of language acquisition due to its frequency and usefulness in our dailycommunication and the complexity in the process of producing relative clauses. Since1970s, considerable research has been conducted on the processing and acquisitiondifficulty of relative clauses, and various predictions based on different rationaleshave been proposed. Thereinto, the most famous ones are Keennan & Comrie'sAccessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis (AHH), Kuno's Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis(PDH), Sheldon's Parallel Function Hypothesis (PFH) and Gibson's Information FlowHypothesis (IFH).The present research, based on the four basic types of relative clauses, that is, SS,SO, OS, and OO, aims to make a complete investigation into the acquisition of themby doing experiments on Chinese English majors as well as the use of relative clausesunconsciously by these participants. Participants involved in the main study wererecruited from Nanchang University. There are four classes of English majors fromthe School of Foreign Studies involved in our experiment. Two of them are GradeTwo and another two are Grade Four. These four classes were identified as fourgroups, namely, Grade 2 Group 1 (G2G1), Grade 2 Group 2 (G2G2), Grade 4 Group 1(G4G1), and Grade 4 Group 2 (G4G2). The material used in the study is aChinese-to-English sentence translation test. The test contains 20 pair of simpleChinese sentences. All of them are translated by the author from English sentencescontaining relative clauses found from English magazines like Reader's Digest,People and so on. Among them, every five pairs represent one type of relative clauses:SS-, SO-, OS-, or OO-type. All the 20 pairs are arranged randomly. The participantsare required to finish all the translation in due time. Moreover, the author designedtwo different directions for the participants. The first two groups are asked to translatethe following Chinese sentences into complex English sentences. The next two groupsare asked to translate the said sentences into complex English sentences with a relative clause.The findings are:First, resulted from the research, the acquisition order of English relative clausesby Chinese English majors is: OS＞OO＞SS＞SO("＞"means more accessible), whichmeans the right branching English relative clauses are easier to process or acquirethan the center-embedded English relative clauses. This result demonstrates a contrastwith the previous researches when the learners' L1 is postnominal (that is, the relativeclauses post modify the head noun). For the learners whose L1 is similar to English inthat their relative clauses post modify the head noun, center-embedded Englishrelative clauses are easier to process than right branching relative clauses. However,the research shows that for the learners whose L1 is different from English becauserelative clauses in their L1 pre-modify the head noun, center-embedded Englishrelative clauses are difficult to process than then right branching relative clauses.Second, by comparison, it is found that Kuno's PDH best predicts the acquisitionorder of English relative clauses by the students in this research while Gibson's IFH isopposite to the acquisition order of English relative clauses by the students in thisresearch. As to AHH proposed by Keenan & Comrie and PFH proposed by Sheldon,they only receive partial support from the present result.Finally, the error ratios for all the groups are no more than 11.00%. The meanvalue of the error ratio of Grade 2, which is 9%, is higher than the mean value of theerror ratio of Grade 4, which is 7.09%. The results indicate that the second gradestudents generally make more errors in using relative clauses than the forth gradestudents. The errors are analyzed and classified into six categories. They are: pronounretention, embedded into the wrong position, be-verb omission, lack of relativepronoun, wrong use of pronoun to substitute relative pronoun, and subject omission.