A Study Of Chinese Learners' Acquisition Of English Relative Clauses

As an important grammatical device for encoding recursion in the world's language, the relative clause has been one of the concerns of linguistic and L2 acquisition studies. But it poses much difficulty for Chinese learners and L2 acquisition researchers not only for the great difference existing between the RC structures in the two languages, but also for the fact that relative clauses (RC) are inclined to be avoided by Chinese learners in their language production. Thus the study of Chinese learners' RC acquisition is of special significance.Previous studies are mostly carried out in terms of formal differences, while the present author observes that the RC in Chinese and English differs not only in forms but also in their semantic functions, frequencies of use and distributions. The present study aims to explore the features and characteristics of and the various influencing factors in Chinese learners acquisition of the relative clause.The present study first contrasts RCs in the two languages. The contrast reveals that RCs in Chinese and English are different in forms, functions and frequencies of use, and also finds in bilingual translation contrast that, due to some functional and syntactical influences, a good number of relative clauses in the source language find no counterparts in the target language. It is based on this latter finding that the present author proposes an assumption that differences in frequencies of use and in semantic functions may affect Chinese learners' RC acquisition to a great extent.The language data used in this study comes from the three sub-corpora in Chinese learner English Corpus (CLEC), which is a large-scale corpus of 1,000,000 words consisting of compositions of Chinese learners of English of different language proficiency. The compositions in the three sub-corpora were collected from students of three levels. They are high school students, college students non-English majors and college students English majors. The three corpora are first searched with the concordance tool "Wordsmith" for files that contain RCs headed by relative pronouns that, which, who, whom and whose.Then the files are examined and tagged in terms of language function and linguistic errors, and then they are counted with the help of the software for statistics in Word system of the computer. The functional and error identification are carried out by the present author with the help of Jonnie, an American teacher who has been working in Qufu Normal University for more than ten years. In the last step, the data and statistics are analyzed and discussed from the quantitative and qualitative point of view. The major findings of this study are as follows:1. Chinese learners' acquisition of relative clauses is a gradual process subject to the influence of a variety of factors, including LI factors, L2 factors, universal grammar and learning strategies.2. Learners' application of relative clauses gradually extends to a wider range of linguistic contexts implying that learners' acquisition of relative clauses follow some predictable route. Learners first acquire restrictive relative clauses, followed by non-restrictive relative clauses and sentential relative clauses. The connective relative clauses are the last to acquire.3. Chinese learners' avoidance of RC is justified in large quantities by statistics in the present study. But RC avoidance is temporary in nature, with learners improving in language proficiency, occurrences of avoidance decrease in number.4. Learner errors are unevenly distributed. The greater part of them is found in the language production of learners of low and medium levels and they can mostly be traced back to LI influence.