Relative clauses in written Hong Kong English: a corpus-based study of untimed student essays

Abstract

ABSTRACT Cantonese English learners in Hong Kong appear to confront substantial difficulty in their development of English relative clauses, yet knowledge on learners’ development of such a language structure is limited. The present corpus-based study aims at verifying predictions of hypotheses about second language learners’ development of English relative clauses with data from written Hong Kong English and identifying quantitative and qualitative attributes of relative clauses in Hong Kong English in comparison with their counterparts in British English in a bid to inform second language grammar instruction. Language data for the study were collected from the Hong Kong and Great Britain components of the International Corpus of English. 'wh' relatives and 'that' relatives in the data were identified from untimed student essays in the corpus through concordance search. The Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis appears to be supported by data from written Hong Kong English whilst the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy and the Subject–Object Hierarchy Hypothesis are only partially supported. Relative clauses appear much more frequently in written British English than in written Hong Kong English, and some attributes of non-standard relative clauses are identified.