영어통사론세미나 발표 과제 2

WELIANNI (20217210)
The use of relative clauses

In conversation, there are preferred patterns of use according to the following criteria : (1) the syntactic
roles of the head noun and the relative pronoun (whether they are ‘subject’ or ‘object’), (2) the definiteness and
specificity of the referent (something can be both definite and specific, or the other way around), (3) the animacy or
humanness of the referent (whether the referent is alive or not), and (4) the discourse function of the relative clauses,
that is whether it functions to give background or new information. According to Fox and Thompson, there are four
usages of the relative clauses in conversation :

Grounding

(1) The car that she borrowed had a low tire (SO type)

In (1), “that she borrowed” grounds the head noun, and it is clear to the reader who ‘she’ is referring to (it is clear
from the text before this that we can’t see). Native speakers show a strong preference for SO type relative clauses to
ground head nouns that have not been fully grounded or established prior to that point in the discourse.

Characterizing

(2) They are selling candies that explode when you chew on them (OS type)

In (2), the speaker is emphasizing that the candy that they sell explodes when you chew on them, it is not just any
regular candy. This type of relative clause (OS type) is used when the speaker is describing or characterizing the
head noun to narrow down the scope of the head nouns.

Giving new information

Fox and Thompson found some interesting tendencies with ‘existential’ head nouns (i.e., logical subjects) following
nonreferential there subjects.

(3) There were two people there who were constantly on stage. ExS (Logical SS type)

In (3), ‘there’ grounds the head noun, and the relative clause moves the discourse forward, that is, it gives new
information about something that we previously didn’t have, which contributes to the development of the discourse.

Ordering

When head nouns are modified by two relative clauses, there is an overwhelming tendency that the preferred relative
clause type occurs first and that the less typical relative clause pattern occurs second. (Recall the preferred patterns:
inanimate subject head nouns prefer relativized objects (SO type); inanimate object head nouns prefer relativized
subjects (OS type); existential human head nouns following ‘there’ subjects prefer relativized subjects (SS type)).
(4) One thing (that) they said that was really interesting was that in the U.S there are over a hundred thousand
people who are over a hundred years old.

The first relative clause after “One thing” follows the preferred SO pattern “(that) they said in the article,” while the
second relative clause, “that was really interesting” is the less preferred SS pattern for an inanimate subject head
noun. Fox and Thompson discovered in the conversation data they used that there are certain patterns in the way that
NPs and relative clauses are combined or used together. They concluded that these patterns were mostly the result of
‘communicative factors’. For example, the speaker grounds new nouns by showing how they are related either to
nouns already mentioned or nouns that are clear from the context.

There have been other corpus-based studies of relative clauses in written English such as Olofsson (1981),
who used the Brown University corpus to uncover some oddities of lexical co-occurrence in relative clauses. For
example, when ‘every’ modifies the head noun, the relativized object is always deleted.

(5) Every man we saw had a tattoo.

Olofsson corpus analysis finds that the syntactic environments favor certain relative pronouns, that is, the usage of
‘that’ for relativized nonhuman subjects, no relative pronoun for relativized nonhuman objects, and the usage of
‘which’ for relativized prepositional objects.

(6) She was a girl in a sunbonnet with eyes that flashed at the guests.

While ‘that’ and ‘which’ are often regarded as being interchangeable after inanimate head nouns, Lapaire and Rotge
suggest that their use codifies different psycho-grammatical strategies; “that” refers to something that has already
been pre-established in the discourse, while “which” is explanatory and fact-finding.

(7) George Balanchine was the foremost exponent of “abstract” or plotless ballet…..But ballet that told no story did
not always win favor with the public (Lapaire and Rotge, p.38)

“Ballet that told no story” is effectively a re-wording of ‘“abstract” or plotless ballet”, while had the writer used
‘which’ he would have been refreshing the reader’s memory. Using ‘that’, the speaker or writer is referring to
information which they consider to already be pre-established and at the forefront of the listener or reader’s mind,
whereas the use of ‘which’ would be recalling information from deeper within the recesses of the listener or reader’s
memory going ‘back to square one’ (Lapaire and Rotge, 1991). Lapaire and Rotge argued that ‘that’ forms a
stronger connection between the head noun and the relative clause than ‘which’; this was also argued by Olofsson,
who suggested that replacing ‘that’ with ‘which’ in (6) would result in a looser connection between the relative
clause and the head noun.
 Given that certain patterns of relative clauses are predominant in discourse produced by native speakers, it
is evident that prioritizing these patterns in English language education would be of great benefit to learners of
English, and as a result, a corpus-based study to determine which relative clause patterns are most common in
spoken and written discourse would be beneficial, even necessary, to the field of ESL/ELT as a whole. This need is
further highlighted by the vast range of relative clause patterns in English, at least 40 if the use of whose is
considered, which presents a daunting barrier to the learner of English as a foreign or second language.