Exploring a Diachronic Change in the Use of English Relative Clauses: A Corpus-Based Study and Its Implication for Pedagogy

Muchamad Sholakhuddin Al Fajri,Victoria Okwar

doi:10.1177/2158244020975027

Muchamad Sholakhuddin Al Fajri, Victoria Okwar

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244020975027

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Journal: SAGE Open	Publication Date: Oct 1, 2020
Citations: 1	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Airlangga University, Lancaster University

Abstract

This corpus-based diachronic study aims to investigate the change in the use of English relative clauses over a 45-year time span. It does not only focus on change over time but also change between two varieties of English (British and American). The data were taken from the Brown family of corpora. Each corpus in the Brown family corpora consists of 500 texts of approximately 2,000 words of written published standard English. The finding indicates that the overall trend of the use of relative clauses in written texts has largely decreased in both American and British English. The frequency of the relative which has experienced a sharp decline in both English and American varieties but the relative pronoun that has dramatically increased. This trend suggests the move toward colloquialization, meaning that both the English varieties tend to employ less formal or speech-like style in written texts. The pedagogical implication of this research is that it can bring about a change in syllabuses and materials of English language teaching (ELT), particularly for teaching general writing by taking into account colloquialization hypothesis.

Highlights

Linguists have developed an interest in the relationship between linguistic knowledge and language use (Wiechmann, 2015, p. 1), giving rise to the move toward linguistic studies that focus on usage-based language which involves examination of frequency of occurrences of different patterns using corpora
Considering the above frequency list, it can be said that relative clauses that begin with which were the most frequently used in the British varieties, while that was the most frequently used in the American corpora
This study gives evidence that such trend still continues. While both the previous studies state that academic writing is more resistant to this trend, our analysis suggests the opposite

Summary

Introduction

Linguists have developed an interest in the relationship between linguistic knowledge and language use (Wiechmann, 2015, p. 1), giving rise to the move toward linguistic studies that focus on usage-based language which involves examination of frequency of occurrences of different patterns using corpora. 1), giving rise to the move toward linguistic studies that focus on usage-based language which involves examination of frequency of occurrences of different patterns using corpora. This approach is likely to overcome the disadvantage of using a qualitative approach. McEnery and Wilson (2001) reiterate that the findings obtained from a qualitative analysis “cannot be tested to discover whether they are statistically significant or more likely to be due to chance” Corpus linguistics has since been canonically employed to investigate various areas of linguistics, including translation (e.g., Bernardini, 2015; Čermáková, 2015), thematic analysis (e.g., Tan & Perudin, 2019), lexicography (e.g., Paquot, 2015; Wild et al, 2013), English language teaching (e.g., Amnuai, 2019; Moon & Oh, 2018; Timmis, 2015), and discourse studies (e.g., Berger et al, 2017; Fajri, 2017)

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