Chinese Relative Clause: A Counter Example to Universal Preference?

 

Jin Wenhua (金文华)

Kennesaw State University

 

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.