A Corpus - Based Study of Restrictive Relative Clauses

This paper aims to investigate the similarities & differences of Restrictive Relative Clauses (RRC) among 3 languages by comparing & contrasting parallel data extracted from a POS-tagged multilingual corpus. This research further provides examples for corpus-based language analysis & application of SLA. This investigation consists of three major works. First, we construct a POS-tagged multilingual parallel corpus (CPEC) in order to search parallel translations of 3 languages. Then, based on Keenan & Comrie’s Accessibility Hierarchy (1977), we study RRCs of Spanish, English & Chinese separately & in parallel by using the concordance of WordSmith & ParaConc to analyze data extracted from our created corpus. Finally, we apply the result to the area of SLA by contrasting the result of parallel data & that of LL. This study reaches the following conclusions. In the analysis of translations, Spanish RRCs with que are mostly translated to other structures in English and to RRCs with DE in Chinese. In the contrastive analysis, the sequences of all AH are similar in Spanish and English (S>DO>PO>IO), but different from Chinese (DO>S). However, all 3 are different from Keenan and Comrie’s AH. In the study of SLA of Spanish, the learner language shows that similar sequence of AH of Spanish and English of native language, and different from Chinese. We conclude that L1 doesn’t affect the learner language while L2 might play a role.