Abstract
Syntactic complexity has received a great deal of attention in the literature on second language writing. Relative clauses, which function as a kind of noun phrase post-modifier, are among those structures that are believed to contribute to the complexity of academic prose. These grammatical structures can pose difficulties for EFL writers even at higher levels of proficiency, and it is therefore important to determine the frequency and accuracy with which relative clauses are used by L2 learners since understanding learners’ strengths and weaknesses in using these structures can inform teachers on ways to improve the process of their instruction in the writing classroom. This paper reports on a corpus-based comparison of relative clauses in a number of argumentative essays written by native and non-native speakers of English. To this end, 30 argumentative essays were randomly selected from the Persian sub-corpus of the ICLE and the essays were analyzed with respect to the relative clauses found in them. The results were then compared to a comparable corpus of essays by native speakers. Different dimensions regarding the structure of relative clauses were investigated. The type of relative clause (restrictive/non-restrictive), the relativizer (adverbial/pronoun), the gap (subject/non-subject), and head nouns (both animate and non-animate) in our two sets of data were manually identified and coded. The findings revealed that the non-native writers tended to use a greater number of relative clauses compared to their native-speaker counterparts.
Highlights
Syntactic complexity has received a great deal of attention in the literature on second language writing
This paper reports on a corpus-based comparison of relative clauses in a number of argumentative essays written by native and non-native speakers of English
This study investigated the frequency of relative clauses in 30 argumentative essays randomly selected from the Iranian sub-corpus of the ICLE and the results were compared with the same number of essays written by American university students
Summary
According to Biber et al., relative clauses that modify a noun phrase can be considered as a form of AN EXAMINATION OF RELATIVE CLAUSES IN ARGUMENTATIVE ESSAYS WRITTEN BY EFL LEARNERS finite clausal postmodification, while nonfinite clausal postmodifiers include ed-clauses, ing-clauses, and to-clauses. Compared to subject gaps, which are more difficult, non-subject relative clauses are found to be more frequent in written registers11 Relativizers, which are another component of relative clauses, comprise two categories: (a) relative pronouns and (b) relative adverbs; and each include the following subcategories: “a relative pronoun--which, who, whom, whose, and that--or a relative adverb--where, when, and why. Many studies have analyzed the use of relative clauses in academic writing for the purposes of drawing comparisons with spoken English or among the sub-registers of written discourse. Biber and Gray (2010) indicated that more cases of relative clauses are observed in academic writing than in conversation, this difference in frequency is not so great compared to prepositional phrases as noun postmodifiers, which are much more frequent in academic writing than conversation. Relatively little attention has been paid to the role of relative clauses in this particular register
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