The Influence Of The Animacy Of Sentential Subject On The Processing Difficulty Of Different Relative Clause Types

As a universal phenomenon, relative clause is always a hot topic in linguisticstudy for its unique syntactic structure and frequent usefulness, and the study ofrelative clause acquisition accordingly attracts great attention from numerousresearchers. Considerable studies have been done on the difficulty order of differenttypes of relative clauses, and various hypotheses are put forward from differentperspectives to deal with the factors that are responsible for the processing difficulty.Those researches mostly focus on the types of relative clauses and matrix positions.Recently, psychologists argue that the animacy of antecedent also plays a role in theprocessing of relative clauses. However, very few empirical studies have combinedthe types of relative clauses with the animacy of sentential subject to study theirinfluence on Chinese learners’ processing difficulty of relative clauses.Based on the previous studies, the present research, from the perspective of bothsyntactic and semantic factors, aims to investigate the processing difficulty of fourbasic relative clause sentence patterns for Chinese learners by manipulating thesentential subjects and the nouns within the relative clauses to see whether theanimacy of sentential subject in a complex sentence has any effect on the processingdifficulty of relative clauses, and simultaneously test the predictions of four influentialhypotheses on the acquisition order of relative clauses. With the types of relativeclause and the animacy of sentential subject as independent variables, the experimentin the present research employs two different elicited tasks, simply, with sentencecombination as comprehension task and sentence completion as production task, tocollect data. All the original data are described and analyzed under the support ofSPSS17.0. In the experiment, the comparison is made not only between the results ofthe two tests but also between the present research and the previous studies toexamine the influence of the animacy of sentential subject on different relative clausesentence patterns as well as the processing difficulty order of the four basic types ofrelative clause for Chinese learners so that a further exploration of Chinese learners difficulty processing order will be obtained.After the detailed comparison and discussion, it is found that there are manyfactors that have constraints on the processing difficulty of Chinese learners’ relativeclause processing. The present research mainly focuses on the influence fromsyntactic complexity and the animacy of sentential subject of complex sentences onfour types of RC processing. The results from the research lend much support to NounPhrase Accessibility Hypothesis, SO Hierarchy Hypothesis and Perspective Shifting.The research also shows that different tasks may cause different difficulty orderconcerning this issue.