*

Accessibility hierarchy for relative clauses in

English:
Part of speech Relative clause
Subject The girl who was sick went home
Direct object The story that I read was long
Indirect object The woman who(m)I gave the present to
was absent
Object of preposition I found the book that John was talking
about
Possessive I know the woman whose the father is
visiting
Object of comparison The person that Susan is taller than is Mary

Languages which include the structure at the bottom of the

table is would also have those at the top, but not vice versa
*
Changing ability to express the same meaning
Similar pattern across learner

Mention Attach Learners

a time grammatical may still
or morpheme, make
verb is marked
place errors
in the past

Learner finds it is easier to mark past tense when

referring to completed events than when referring to
states and activities without a clear end-point.
*

“ there are systematic and predictable

stages, or sequences,
of acquisition”
*In the developmental stages, learners do not left
behind when they enter another
*In examining language sample:
* the individual learner: cannot examine one example
in every stages.
*Group Learners: may use sentences typical of several
different stages
*Stress or complexity in a communicative interaction
can cause the learner to ‘slip back’ to an earlier
stage