The Competition Between Nouns And The Production Of Relative Clauses: A Study Based On A Parallel Database Of Chinese And English Relative Clauses

The mapping from thought to language is constrained by many factors, amongwhich accessibility is one of the most important. The existing research has found thatanimacy-based accessibility exerts effects on the choice of syntactic functions,sentence structures and voice as well as word order. When it comes to complexsentences, relative clauses serve as an excellent domain in which to investigate howproducers converge on utterance choices in that the positions of the head nouns aredefault (e.g. initial in English and final in Chinese), and the choice of relative clausestructures is largely dependent on the head nouns, especially their animacy.With this in view, Gennari et al.(2012), based on five experiments, made anattempt at the effects of animacy-based accessibility and similarity-based competitionon the production of relative clauses, particularly on the choice of relative clauses,their voice, and the omission of agents in passive structures and the relativizers. Theirresults aroused the interest of this study in the following questions: the effects of thecompetition between noun phrases on the choice above, as well as the effects of thesemantic role on the production of relative clause types and the choice of their voice.The theoretical framework of the research by Gennari et al. covers animacy-based accessibility and similarity-based competition, the former of which is focusedon animate-inanimate division, while the latter on the conceptual competition betweenanimate entities. A re-reading of Silverstein’s animacy hierarchy (1976) tells that thecompetition said earlier takes place inter-and intra-positions---the five positions ofanimate entities, which is evident that such accessibility and competition asmentioned above are consubstantial. The only difference between them lies in thelatter’s more elaborate division. Therefore, it is only natural for the two to beintegrated into the same system---the competition system between nouns. As theconceptual competition and interference are key to Production, Distribution andComprehension (PDC in short), a bridge is built across the system and PDC itself fora better investigation into the interaction between production and distribution.As the experiment results welcome tests in natural languages, a parallel database of10novels is built for this purpose, in which five are in English and the other five inChinese. Altogether,6,166relative clauses qualify for the database, which are taggedwith the resources, pages, modifiers, relative pronouns, grammatical functions of thehead nouns and the relativized nouns, animacy of the head nouns, semantic roles ofthe head nouns and the relativized nouns, the voice of the relative clauses, animacy ofthe competing nouns, and the omission of the agents in passive structures, if possible.The analysis by SPSS finds that, generally, the animacy-based accessibility in thecompetition system generalizes, to an extent, the shared tendency of the relativeclause production, such as the choice of relative clause types and their voice. But amore elaborate research has to be done in light of similarity-based competition, likethe omission of agents, and some distributional patterns are better investigated withthe application of PDC, like the omission of relativizers, where contextual andsemantic factors also come into play. Another important finding is that semantic rolesare more powerful than noun phrase competition in the choice of some relativeclauses and their voice. What’s more, the effect of such factors as mentioned abovevaries across languages.