A Contrastive Study Of English Relative Clauses In The Written Production By Chinese English Majors And English Native Speakers

During past thirty years, relative clause (RC), which embodies the recursive nature of language, has drawn widespread attention from researchers focusing either on syntactic analysis and processing, or on language acquisition due to its unique syntactic features and significant role in grammar. In recent years, most empirical studies at home and abroad concentrate on testifying different hypotheses of L2acquisition of relative clauses. Most studies support Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH) Hypothesis and Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis (PDH), and some studies provide evidence for the complementary relationship between the accessibility and embededness. Presently, there are limited corpus-based studies on the production of RCs by Chinese EFL learners and English native speakers.This thesis conducted a corpus-based contrastive study by using the data from the two corpora:SWECCL (Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners) and LOCNESS (Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays), which attempted to investigate the use of RCs by Chinese English majors of their third and fourth years, and by American and British college students in their untimed compositions, as well as the effects of NPAH, PDH, and Subject Object Hierarchy Hypothesis (SOHH) on RCs produced by them. Antconc3.3.5was used to search for all the RCs and Independent Sample T Test was applied to see the observed differences, and the reasons were given in detail. Specifically, the research questions are set as follows:1.What are the most frequently produced types of RCs by both Chinese English majors and English native speakers in the two types of data and what are the least frequently produced types of RCs?2. Do Chinese English majors use fewer relative clauses than native speakers in terms of the density of different types of RCs?3. Are the acquisition orderings of the RCs produced by Chinese English majors and English native speakers consistent with the predictions of NPAH, PDH, and SOHH?Results exhibit that both Chinese students and English native speakers produced Subject type of RCs the most frequently, but in two types of data, neither Chinese students nor British or American students produced any RCs of Indirect object and Object of comparison type, which may be due to the content and topic of their writings as well as the effect of the Accessibility Hypothesis. Additionally, in terms of density of each type of RCs, Chinese students produced much more RCs than native speakers. Their writings differ considerably in word number and length, and English native speakers are adept at producing long and complex sentences, which does not mean they can produce more relative clauses than Chinese English majors. Furthermore, results from in the present study fully support NPAH hypothesis and PDH, but partially support SOHH. Accessibility and embeddedness interrelate in a complementary relationship.It is suggested that English teachers adopt effective teaching methods to improve college students’knowledge on RCs and facilitate them to use RCs more idiomatically. It is also advisable that students be taught the differences between Chinese and English so that their language proficiency can be improved. The teaching of more difficult RC types can lead to the learning of the easier and less marked RC types.