Acquisition Of Korean Students In Chinese Relative Clauses

Relative clause (RC) is universal but special linguistic phenomenon among most of the languages in the world. It is frequently used in people's everyday life and has drawn the attention of researchers of various countries who are interested in language acquisition. The study of its acquisition difficulty mainly concentrated on two aspects: Firstly, the function of the head noun in the RC, which results in the different types of RCs, namely, SU, SU, DO, IO, OPREP, GEN, and OCOMP. The other is the place where the RC is embedded into the matrix clause, which is reflected as two positions: the matrix subject position and the matrix object position. Even though foreign researchers have discussed this problem and proposed all sorts of explanations from quite a number of different perspectives, we still have not come to a satisfactory conclusion up to now. The reason for that is as the following. On one hand, the comprehension and production of any discourse are always affected by varied factors, but most of these explanations just paid attention to one factor while neglecting the others; on the other hand, most of the researches above are not inclusive enough, they just took into consideration the most frequently-used RCs, and the rest were paid no attention.In contemporary China, related research is quite scarce, let alone being inclusive and profound. In order to overcome this shortcoming, the current research, based on related research findings available, was targeted on Korean students learning Chinese in China, and tried to discuss the problem of Korean speakers'acquisition of Chinese RC in a relatively complete way. I collected my data through a comprehension test and a production test, and conducted a statistical analysis with the data obtained to get an idea about the relative difficulty of various types of RCs and to find out what effects the RC type and matrix position have on the comprehension and production of a relative clause. Furthermore, the results of the present research were tested against the previous hypotheses so as to obtain a deeper and more thorough understanding of the comprehension and production of the Chinese RCs.As the result turns out RC type has a significant effect on the acquisition and processing of relative clauses, based on different types of relative clauses, we've discovered an explicit order of acquiring difficulty, and found that even if RCs of GEN type are syntactically more complex than their OPREP counterpart, however, it is much less difficult to acquire. As for embedding position, this variable itself does not have significant impact on the acquiring and processing of RCs, but we have also found, from the production test result of the experimental group, that when RCs are at the matrix subject position, the difference in RC types will induce a greater influence on the processing and acquiring of RCs; the reason is the subject position of Chinese sentences tends to be more reluctant to accept a long attributive, furthermore, the greater processing difficulty a RC type entails, the less acceptable it will be in the matrix subject position. Lastly, through an exploration of the four types of most commonly used RCs, we have come to the conclusion that Information Flow Hypothesis (IFH) can not be satisfactorily applied to the context of the acquisition of Chinese RCs, while Perspective Shifting Hypothesis (PSH) is only partially supported by the current test result, and its explanatory and predictive power is considerably constrained in the specific context of this study.