A Study On Transfer In Relative Clauses From The Perspective Of Chinese English Learners' Acquisition

Since 1970s, relative clause has attracted numerous linguists and second language researchers because of its universality, its unique syntactic properties and its frequency and usefulness in everyday use of language. The researches of relative clause have been widely explored abroad, but the studies at home are relatively rare. Besides, the domestic researches focus on the acquisition of English relative clause, and seldom are conducted to explore the language transfer of relative clause. Therefore, this thesis will make a tentative study to apply the contrastive analysis to the study of native language transfer in relative clause from the perspective of Chinese English learners' acquisition.The predictions of contrastive analysis have always been doubted by the opposers. Based on the contrastive analysis of the structures of English relative clause and Chinese relative clause, the author will present some hypotheses, and then an empirical study will be conducted to test whether those hypotheses are right or not. Thus, the predictions of contrastive analysis will be tested as well. Besides, few researchers took a non-structural factor, i.e. the language proficiency into consideration, and this thesis will explore whether it plays any role in the Chinese English learners' acquisition of relative clause.There are 90 subjects taking part in this experiment. The elementary learners are 30 junior college freshmen from Huanghe Science and Technology University. The intermediate learners are 30 non-English major sophomores from Zhengzhou University. The advanced learners are 30 English major sophomores from Zhengzhou University. All the subjects are randomly chosen. The data in this thesis are collected from the given topic composition task and sentence combination test and then are discussed systematically by SPSS.15.0.The results of the experiment confirm all the hypotheses the author mentioned. Firstly, due to the wide differences of the English relative clause and Chinese relative clause, the Chinese English learners underproduce relative clause. Secondly, all the predictions based on the contrastive analysis of the relative clause in the two languages are confirmed one by one. Thirdly, the subjects' English language proficiency does play a vital role in their acquisition of English relative clause. The higher their language proficiency level is, the better their performance is and the fewer their transfer errors are. However, the differences between the elementary group and either the intermediate group or the advanced group is of great significance, but the differences between the intermediate group and the advanced group is insignificant.The present study enriches and develops the relevant research about the second language learners' acquisition of English relative clause and has certain significance both theoretically and practically. In theory, it tests the positive function of contrastive analysis and language transfer theory; in practice, it presents some implications for the English teachers, English learners, as well as the designers of English textbooks.The first chapter is the research background, research purposes and research questions. The second chapter presents the relevant theories and reviews the previous studies of relative clause. The third chapter is the contrastive analysis of relative clause between in English and Chinese. The fourth chapter provides the hypotheses based on the previous chapter's analysis, and designs an experimental study in order to confirm those hypotheses. The fifth chapter is the results of the data and data discussion. The last chapter is the major findings of this thesis, the implications, the limitations and suggestions.