On Production Of Chinese Relative Clauses

As one of the most natural and universal phenomena in human languages, the relative clause is a heated issue which is often frequented by linguists from home and abroad. Most researches concerning relative clauses study the asymmetry of processing difficulty between subject-extracted relative clauses and object-extracted relative clauses. Previous studies indicate that in the head-initial languages (like English), the subject-extracted relative clause is easier to produce than the object-extracted relative clause, thus suggesting a preference for subject-extracted relative clauses. This argument has been testified and supported by a series of empirical studies via language comprehension/production experiments. Generally speaking, the preference for subject-extracted relative clauses is prevailing among head-initial languages.In respective of typology, Chinese is one of the few languages whose feature is a unity of Subject-Verb-Object syntactic order with head-final property, which is distinctive from that of English. In the past few decades, there are strong disputes over the processing difficulty between subject-extracted Chinese relative clauses and object-extracted relative clauses. On the one hand, some scholars maintain that the processing difficulty of Chinese relative clauses is in line with the hypothesis of the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH). Namely, the preference for subject-extracted relative clauses still dominates in Chinese. On the other hand, some researches concerning the processing of Chinese relative clauses argue that in some comprehension and production experiments, object-extracted relative clauses were easier to process than subject-extracted relative clauses. Consequently, the controversial issue that whether the processing difficulty of Chinese relative clauses is in line with the prediction of NPAH or not still awaits further exploration.From a novel angel, this paper orients to study the processing difficulty of Chinese relative clauses among English native speaker who take Chinese as second language, so as to provide empirical evidence for the study of relative clauses. The study selects English native speakers with low or high level of Chinese proficiency as the experimental participants, who are seldom examined in former studies. By means of an off-line written test concerning Chinese relative clauses, the study aims to investigate the participants’ processing difficulty over Chinese relative clauses. Regarding that the majority of the previous studies explored the comprehension of Chinese relative clauses, the experiment will mainly focus on the production of Chinese relative clauses. The written test consists of three tasks:English-Chinese sentence translation, sentence combination and sentence-making with supportive context, so as to examine the participants’ processing difficulty of Chinese relative clauses from different perspectives. In addition, variables like the bias of relative clauses’ verb, the animacy of the object in the relative clauses, as well as the supportive context have been put into consideration during the task design, thus their influence over the participants’ Chinese relative clause processing difficulty could be explored.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One delivers a general introduction towards the background, objectives and significance of the research; Chapter Two elucidates the theoretical framework of relative clauses, together with the empirical studies concerning the production of relative clauses and second language acquisition; Chapter Three introduces the hypothesis and methodology of the thesis; Chapter Four serves as the general discussion towards the experimental results; and Chapter Five concludes the whole research in terms of implications and limitations.The experimental results manifest that the animacy of NPs in relative clauses poses an insignificant difference for Chinese relative clause processing difficulty. By contrast, other linguistic factors like the bias of VPs in the relative clause, the valence of verbs, together with the supportive context, pose a significant difference for processing of the two types of Chinese relative clauses.The findings of the research may on the one hand serve as a complement in studies concerning processing of relative clauses and on the other hand provide evidence and support for revealing the human brain’s mechanism of processing relative clause as well as for Chinese L2 teaching practices.