A Study Of Chinese Teenagers' Acquisition Of English Relative Clauses Based On TECCL Corpus

English relative clauses are one of the most important sentence patterns in English.Some famous foreign scholars have investigated the acquisition order of relative clauses and put forward some relevant theoretical hypotheses.The most famous theoretical hypotheses are the Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis of Kuno(1974),the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis of Keenan and Comrie(1977),and the Subject-Object Hierarchy Hypothesis of Hamilton(1994).They make different predictions about the acquisition order of relative clauses.And the theoretical basis of these three theoretical hypotheses is different from each other.Based on the background of research,the author explores the acquisition of English relative clauses used by Chinese learners based on the latest Ten-thousand English Compositions of Chinese Learners Corpus(the TECCL Corpus).And tests whether it conforms to the relevant theoretical hypothesis proposed by the predecessors on the acquisition order of the relative clauses.After analyzing of the data,the author draws some conclusions.First of all,the Chinese learners prefer to use the relative clauses guided by the relative pronoun “which”in the five types of relative clauses guided by different relative pronouns.And the learners generally prefer to use restrictive relative clauses in the different functional types of relative clauses.In the same time,when using the non-restricted relative clauses,learners prefer to use sentential relative clauses.In different groups,this phenomena gradually decrease from learners in high school(low-proficiency learners)to learners in university(high-proficiency learners).In addition,through sorting and summarizing the results of study,the author obtains the acquisition order of English relative clauses in Chinese learners.According to the role of the head noun in the subordinate clause,the acquisition order of learners is that SU>DO > OPREP > GEN > IO > OCOMP(the order of six types of English relative clauses from high to low).Obviously,the result above shows partially support for Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis in this study.If only considering the position of thehead noun in the matrix sentence,the acquisition order of overall learners in this study is that: OS > SS / OO > SO(the order of four kinds of relative clauses are from high to low).The author also combines both the position of the head noun in the matrix sentence and the role of the head noun in the subordinate clause.The acquisition order of overall learners is that: OS > SS / OO > SO(the order of four types of English relative clauses from high to low).The result fully supports the Subject-Object Hierarchy Hypothesis.Finally,the author hopes that this study can provide a theoretical and methodological support for future research in related fields.And the author gives some constructive suggestions for English teaching to continuously improve the quality of English teaching in the future.