The Comprehension of Relative Clauses by Romance Learners of English: Syntactic and Semantic Influences
Year: 2017
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Relative clauses have fascinated linguists and psycholinguists for decades and have been the field of investigation of theories in the native language (L1) as well as in the acquisition of the second language (L2).The present thesis builds upon the previous research on relative clauses (RC) and seeks to discover whether the comprehension of RCs by Romance learners of English follows a gradient of difficulty and to determine which variables affect this comprehension.More specifically, it aims to see whether the L2 comprehension of RCs matches Keenan and Comrie's (1977) Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy, which predicts that the comprehension difficulty of subject, object, and oblique RCs is in increasing order, and to detect the influence of L2 syntax, L2 semantics, and cross-linguistic transfer on the L2 comprehension of RCs.Previous research on RCs has revealed that, in Germanic and Romance languages, some RCs are easier to process by native adults than others, in particular subject RCs that contain animate referents and full noun phrases take less time to process than object ones.In other words, the RC difficulty depends on the syntactic function (subject or object) of the RC, on the semantic animacy of the RC referents (animate or inanimate), and on the semantic category of the embedded nouns (noun phrase or pronoun).This asymmetry between subject and object RCs, however, appears in the processing of RCs by L1 adults, but not in their comprehension.On the other hand, it is unclear whether this asymmetry applies to adult L2 learners because the RC research in L2 acquisition has tested other skills than processing and comprehension and has included languages other than Germanic or Romance languages, for which the subject-object RC asymmetry is still disputed.Therefore, the present research focuses on the comprehension of subject, object, and oblique RCs that contain animate referents and full noun phrases, as in the example Show me the dog that the cat is chasing, by learners of English who have Romance languages as L1, in particular French or Italian, so that the conclusions of L1 research on RCs fully apply to the experiment subjects. Chapter 6General Discussion and Conclusions ..........
Author: Marie-Anne Duffeler
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2782209905