Pronoun Misuses In English Restrictive Attributive Clauses By Chinese Learners Of English

Within the framework of generative grammar, this study explores and discusses thepronoun misuses, pronoun retention and pronoun deletion, in English restrictive attributiveclauses (ERACs) through a sentence-grammaticality judgment-correction test carried on60English major graduate students and60non-English major junior college students. Then astatistical analysis is made on the data collected based on SPSS software. The results indicatethat firstly, accessibility hierarchy of relative clauses has an effect on the pronoun misuses andthere exists an asymmetry between two kinds of pronoun misuses. Secondly, the learners’English proficiency level and L1transfer relate to the pronoun retention. The error rate inpronoun retention of elementary group is higher than that of advanced group. Thirdly, Englishproficiency level produces few impacts on the result of pronoun deletion. The error rate inpronoun deletion of advanced group is higher than that of elementary group.Specifically, the explanations are given to the manifestation of asymmetry and otherspecial performances on different clauses from the view of syntactic level and cognitive salience.On the one hand, it is easier to learn a simple structure than a complex one. The complexity oflanguage structure increases the acquisition difficulty. On the other hand, due to cognitivesalience, the complexity or specificity of a language structure causes learners to pay moreattention to the specific form and fix it in memory, which results in the better performance onproduction and precision rate. As for the performance on asymmetry in pronoun retentionbetween groups with different proficiency levels, this study proposes L1transfer. Primarylearners are prone to copy resumptive pronoun in relative clause than advanced learners. Whileit seems that the effect of L1is developmental, the higher the learners’ proficiency level is, theless dependence on their L1structure they have. Finally, based on the language markednesstheory and parameter resetting theory, the study discusses the performance of asymmetry inpronoun deletion between learners with different English proficiency levels. The study begins with two kinds of pronoun misuses in ERACs, and then givesexplanations for the results and findings. Also the paper further makes discussions about therelations of the pronoun misuses in ERACs with the famous noun phrase accessibility hierarchy(NPAH) hypothesis and wh-movement parameter resetting. It is helpful to reveal the learner’sinter language acquisition process and provide guidance for English learning and teaching.