A corpus-based analysis of Chinese relative clauses produced by Japanese and Thai learners

A corpus-based analysis of Chinese relative clauses produced by Japanese and Thai learners Yike Yang Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Hong Kong SAR yi-ke.yang@connect.polyu.hk Abstract Concerning the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs), studies on head-initial languages con- sistently reported a preference for subject- gapped RCs, but the issue of subject-object asymmetry is still a controversial one in re- search on the acquisition of RCs in head-final languages. Using written corpus data, this study investigated the second language produc- tion of RCs in Mandarin Chinese (Chinese) by Japanese-speaking and Thai-speaking learners with various proficiency levels. We first ex- tracted the RCs produced by Japanese and Thai learners from the HKS Dynamic Composition Corpus, and coded head type and gap type for further analyses. The learners from the inter- mediate-level groups produced a significant number of error-free RCs, which suggests that the intermediate learners have already mas- tered Chinese RCs. Both Japanese and Thai learners exhibited a strong preference for the subject RCs, which is consistent with predic- tions that follow from the Noun Phrase Acces- sibility Hierarchy (NPAH) and the results of studies on head-initial languages. Our data also provided partial support for the Subject-Object Hierarchy (SOH). However, the size of the cor- pus was insufficient to exhaustively investigate the tested theories. More data are needed to ex- amine the applicability of the NPAH and SOH hypotheses in L2 Chinese and in general. Keywords: corpus; second language acquisi- tion; Chinese relative clauses; subject-object asymmetry 1 Introduction The acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in both first language (L1) and second language (L2) has been widely studied for decades. However, there re- main controversial issues in previous research, such as that of subject-object asymmetry, especially in the context of Asian languages. Subject-object asymmetry has been the focus of inquiry in RC ac- quisition since the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hier- archy was proposed in the 1970s (Keenan & Comrie, 1977), and studies on post-nominal Indo-European languages generally accept that there is a subject preference (Izumi, 2003; Keenan & Hawkins, 1987), but the data from pre-nominal languages yield mixed results (Chan et al., 2011; Zhang & Yang, 2010). Using written corpus data, this study exam- ined the production of RCs in Mandarin Chinese (henceforth, Chinese) by Japanese and Thai learners to investigate the subject-object asymmetry. Our data will also shed light on whether and how typo- logical variations affect the acquisition process. This paper begins with a brief introduction of RCs in Chinese, Japanese and Thai languages, and then reviews issues in the acquisition of RCs, par- ticularly in the acquisition of Chinese RCs. The re- search questions and methods of the study will be described in Section 2. The results of the study will be presented in Section 3. General discussion and concluding remarks will appear in the final section. 1.1 Relative constructions A relative construction comprises a nominal (i.e. head) and a subordinate clause (i.e. relative clause) that attributively modifies the nominal (Lehmann, 1986). An ‘under-represented’ element …

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