A Study Of Chinese College Students' Acquisition Of English Relative Clauses

Relative clause (RC), as a universal linguistic phenomenon and an important grammatical device for encoding recursion, has drawn considerable attention and been one of the major concerns in the field of linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA) studies. However, it poses great difficulty for Chinese ESL learners and great interest for SLA researchers due to the great distinctions between relative clause structure in English and Chinese both in form and function. In addition, Chinese students are inclined to use avoidance strategy in the process of production of English relative clauses. Therefore, the study of English relative clause acquisition by Chinese learners is of vital and special significance. Then, what are the characteristics of Chinese students'acquisition of English relative clauses? Do they often make errors? Do the cross-linguistic differences affect their acquisition? What are the causes and nature of avoidance phenomenon?Based on the previous studies, the present study explores the acquisition of English relative clauses in writings of Chinese college students by means of contrastive analysis and error analysis. The contrastive analysis is conducted not only on the cross-linguistic differences in form but also in semantic function. Meanwhile, the errors made by Chinese college students at three different proficiency levels are classified and the possible causes are explored. Besides, the present study also examines the frequency of relative clause use, distribution as well as the acquisition order of English relative clauses on the basis of four main types, that is: the relative clause pattern in which a subject relative clause is embedded in the matrix subject position (SS), the relative clause pattern in which an object relative clause is embedded in the matrix subject position (SO), the relative clause pattern in which a subject relative clause is embedded in the matrix object position (OS), the relative clause pattern in which an object relative clause is embedded in the matrix object position (OO), the result of which validates perceptual difficulty hypothesis (PDH) and subject-object hierarchy hypothesis (SOHH).The research data collected are 150 compositions written by Chinese college students at three different proficiency levels including English major and non-English major students out of Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC). Through the quantitative and qualitative analysis and discussion of the data and statistics, the major findings of the study are summarized as follows:1. The avoidance strategy is used by Chinese college students in English RC production in their writings. This behavior mainly results from cross-linguistic differences in relative clause structure between English and Chinese.2. Learners'use of relative clauses gradually extends to a wider scope and acquisition of relative clauses follows a certain predictable pattern. Learners first acquire the restrictive relative clauses, followed by non-restrictive relative clauses and sentential relative clauses. Continuative relative clauses are the last to be acquired.3. Seven types of RC errors are identified and some of them can be traced back to L1 interference and others can be ascribed to lack of knowledge or incomplete understanding of English RC structure. The percentage of errors sees a noticeable decrease with the improvement of language proficiency. 4. Chinese college students, either at primary, intermediate or advanced level, follows the learning order in their English RC acquisition, that is: OS>OO/SS>SO. This sequence fully supports the predictions made by SOHH and partly supports PDH.