A Variationist Study Of Relativizers In EFL Chinese Learners' Spoken English: From A Labovian Perspective

This study, embedded within the framework of variationist theory, aims to pinpoint the constraints of that/zero/which/who relativizer variation in EFL Chinese learners spoken English first and to further identify the hierarchy among those selected constraints. It also looks into the relativizer variation in native English speakers speech to see if the same hierarchy of constraints applies to both native and second language speakers.The research data is generated on the basis of a corpus of 1,521 tokens, which are produced in naturally occurring speech in the environment of oral test for English majors in China. The analytic method of Labovian quantitative sociolinguistics-Variable Rule Analysis-is adopted as the major statistical approach to identify the contextual factors that contribute significantly to the choice among that, which, who and null relativizer.The findings of this study manifest a spreading trend of WH- forms in Chinese EFL learners speech. The impact of Grammatical Ideology Hypothesis may account for this phenomenon in that clauses with relativizers are closer to the logical form than those without in that relativizers render the relationship between the main clause and the embedded clause much clearer. And the relativizer is more often omitted than that application. One proposed explanation is that relativizer deletion requires fewer efforts for production.The results also demonstrate a similar model of relativizer variation in Chinese EFL learners and that in the native speakers. However, there are also discrepancies of the magnitude of effect of some factors. Namely, adjacent antecedents have a neutral effect on zero choice in Chinese EFL learners speech but it is favorable in native speakers corpus, and null relativizer also appears in the subject position of the relative clause in learners corpus while never in the natives speech.