Chinese Relative
Clause: A Counter Example to Universal Preference?
Jin Wenhua
(金文华)
Studies on adult sentence
processing of relative clauses in English and many other languages in the past
three decades have revealed a robust preference for Subject-extracted relative
clauses (SRs) over Object-extracted relative clauses
(ORs). The results of the several Chinese L1 relative
clause processing and L2 acquisition studies, however, remain inconclusive and
contradictory, providing, in some cases, counter examples to what appear to be
universal.
This study investigates the
issue of L2 acquisition of Chinese relative clauses by English speakers via
three different kinds of data elicitation tasks, including sentence
translation, listening comprehension, and grammaticality judgment. It takes
into account the grammatical function of the head noun in the matrix clause and
the animacy of the noun phrases in the matrix
position and within the relative clause, and seeks to verify the accountability
of seven language processing theories towards the Chinese data.
Result of the study reveals that, from the
perspective of L2 acquisition, Chinese object relative clauses are relatively
easier than subject relative clauses regardless of the matrix position of the
head noun. It also reveals animacy configuration as a
confounding factor in relative clause acquisition and the correlation between
the frequency of distribution in the corpus and the relative easiness of the
relative clause acquisition. The result also suggests that the validity of the
previously proposed theories is language specific rather than universal.