The Development of Relative Clauses in L2 Chinese: A Corpus-Based Study

Acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in a second language (L2) has long been a popular research focus, particularly in determining whether L2 learners’ acquisition of RCs conforms to the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH) (Keenan & Comrie, 1977), which proposes that subject-extracted RCs are the easiest to learn because they are the most commonly produced RC type with the fewest error rate. Early studies have mostly focused on Indo-European languages, especially English. In this study, we adopt a corpus-based approach to analyze the distribution of subject-extracted RCs (SRCs) and object-extracted RCs (ORCs) by Chinese learners with six different L1s and at two proficiency levels to test whether SRCs are easier than ORCs for Chinese L2 learners. The corpus we used is the Test of Chinese as a Foreign Language (TOCFL) Learner Corpus comprised 4,709 compositions written by test-takers of the writing section. A total of 2,055 RCs are analyzed, including 1,362 RCs at the CEFR-B1 (intermediate-high) level and 693 RCs at the CEFR-B2 (advanced) level by native speakers of English, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Indonesian, representing three different language typologies. From the perspectives of RCs occurring in the grammatical position in the matrix sentence and the animacy of the head noun, the results show that ORCs for Chinese L2 learners are easier than SRCs. These results go against the NPAH hypothesis. In addition, no matter what branching types (i.e. left, right, or left-and-right) the learner’s native language was, all lower-proficiency level language learners produced more ORCs than SRCs. These results coincide with the development pattern of RCs for L1 Chinese acquisition. Therefore, we propose that the dominant factor in learning Chinese RCs is word order, since ORCs have the same SVO word order as Chinese simple sentences. Regardless of learners’ language background, learners can produce ORCs more naturally and with more ease. After the L2 language proficiency increases, SRCs will take over that advantage and learners’ language use will become gradually closer to the target language.