The Study On Chinese English Learners' Acquisition Of English Relative Clauses

Relative clause, as a universal linguistic phenomenon, has received considerable attention of the language acquisition researchers just because of its unique syntactic properties and its frequent usefulness in communication. Previous research on relative clause acquisition mainly focuses on two syntactic aspects: the function the head noun serves in the sub-clause and the position of the sub-clause embedded in the main clause. Based on different rationales, several different predictions on relative clause process difficulty order have been proposed by researchers abroad. But till now, few predictions have been fully supported by the data from all related experimental research. The present study, from the perspective of syntax and semantics, aims to investigate the four widely used relative clause sentence patterns (SS, SO, OO, and OS) of Chinese English learners through manipulating the animacy of the sentential subject and the noun within the relative clause in a complex sentence to see whether the animacy of the sentential subject and the noun within the relative clause has any effects on the investigated relative clause sentence patterns, and further to test which hypotheses are the best to account for the present results. In this study, both the comprehension test and the production test are used to collect data. The main findings are:The results from the comprehension test indicate that it is the RC sentence patterns that mainly influence the process difficulty order of them and the effects caused by the animacy of sentential subject and the noun within the relative clause have not been clearly perceived. The obtained results lend much support to Kuno's Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis. As for the results from the production test, the effects caused by the RC sentence patterns are still present, and the effects caused by the animacy of the sentential subject and the noun within the relative clause has reached a significant level, especially in SO and OO. The difficulty associated with object-relative clauses is greatly reduced when the sentential subject is inanimate. This suggests that the acquisition of different RC sentence patterns are not completely determined by syntactic complexities, the semantic factors show their existence too.The present study has also found out that the participants appear to prefer to treat sentential subjects as the subject of adjacent relative clauses, and to allocate animate nouns to subject positions and inanimate nouns to object positions in a sentence. The way that animacy affects sentence production has something to do with the cognitive efforts which are needed to integrate meaning with the given verbs. As for the effects caused by RC sentence patterns is concerned, Perspective Shifting Hypothesis is the best one to account for the results obtained from production test.