The results of the RC judgment test highlight two major problems interfering
with the subjects’ use of NRRCs: (1) the tendency to overuse RRCs in any given
context; and (2) the tendency to employ NRRCs only with lexically accessible NPs
(i.e. uniqueness-referring NPs) and disregard other referentially accessible NPs.
These problems respectively point to inadequacies in the subjects’ acquisition of
NRRCs: (1) a failure to draw a clear distinction between RRCs and NRRCs in their
mental grammar of English RCs; and (2) a failure to gain a full understanding of
when to use NRRCs. Their “flawed” acquisition of NRRCs is explicable in terms of
L1 transfer, cognitive complexity, input frequency, and instructional effects.
First of all, the subjects’ acquisition of NRRCs may have been affected by the
negative transfer of their mother tongue, Chinese. In English, RCs are further
categorized into two subtypes according to whether they delimit the domain of
reference of their antecedents (i.e. restrictive RCs) or simply provide additional
information about them (i.e. non-restrictive RCs). In Chinese, nevertheless, such
differentiation does not exist in that the main and sole function of Chinese RCs is to
identify or define their head NPs, that is, Chinese RCs are purely restrictive. In the
light of this functional difference in RCs between the two languages, it can be posited
that the subjects may have unconsciously transferred the exclusively restrictive nature
of RCs in Chinese into their mental grammar of English RCs, becoming oblivious of
the dichotomous RC distinction maintained in English. Under the influence of their
native language, the subjects seldom sought to further distinguish between RRCs and
NRRCs when using English RCs, thereby showing a tendency to overuse RCCs in
nearly all contexts.
As valid and important a factor in the subjects’ acquisition of NRRCs is the
cognitive complexity inherent in the target structure itself—more specifically, their
failed acquisition of NRRCs is attributable to their inability to fully grasp the
context-based concept of referential accessibility, closely related with the use of
NRRCs. Contrasting with their restrictive counterparts in the referential status of the
antecedent, NRRCs are used only when the referents of their heads are well
established in context. Apparently, in order to acquire NRRCs, one needs to well
understand the notion of referential accessibility. This, however, can be a
cognitively difficult task for learners, most of whom are so accustomed to learning
English at a sentential level that they may not be able to discern how context, be it
lexical, linguistic, or situational, renders a given NP identifiable and prefers NRRCs
over RRCs. It is likely that for lack of a deep appreciation of the notion of
referential accessibility, the subjects still had a hard time establishing a clear
distinction between RRCs and NRRCs in their mental grammar of English RCs, and
thus ended up mixing up the two by overusing the prototypical, unmarked type of
RCs, i.e. RRCs.
Furthermore, the subjects’ unsatisfactory acquisition of NRRCs may be
accounted for by their having less exposure to this particular construction. Since
instructional materials are often the main source of L2 input for learners, to explore
the relationship between acquisition of NRRCs and input frequency, English
textbooks published by Far East (Books 1-6)1, one of the versions used by senior high
schools in Taiwan, were examined to calculate frequencies of RRCs and NRRCs in
reading texts. Table 18 shows occurrences of both RC types in the six textbooks:
1 The rationale for selecting the Far East version in particular for the examination is based on its wide use not only by the subjects’ schools (i.e. National Chia-Yi Girl’s Senior High School, National Hu-Wei Senior High School, and Taipei Municipal Xisong Senior High School) but also by the vast majority of senior high schools in Taiwan.
Table 18: Frequency counts of RRCs and NRRCs in Far East English textbooks of senior high school
Type Book Book1 Book2 Book3 Book4 Book5 Book6 Books1-6
Restrictive 45 44 58 74 70 117 408
Non-restrictive 7 6 6 20 23 23 85
Total RCs* 52 50 64 94 93 140 493
* RCs counted here included fully-fledged RCs (with relative pronouns and adverbs), reduced RCs (with participial phrases), headless RCs (with such relatives as what, whoever), and cleft RCs; occurrences of non-finite RCs (with to-phrases) were dismissed.
As can be seen from Table 18, throughout the three years of senior high school, RCs
to which learners are exposed are predominantly restrictive, with 408 occurrences
observed, as opposed to 85 occurrences of non-restrictive ones. It may follow from
the low frequency of NRRC input in text2 that the total amount of NRRC input
received at the senior high school stage still was not enough for the subjects to readily
consolidate and internalize this “idiosyncratic” structure into their abuilding mental
grammar of English RCs. Accordingly, the subjects were prone to underuse NRRCs,
with which they were less familiar, and overuse RRCs, with which they were more
acquainted. Moreover, this insufficient exposure to NRRCs in text may partly
explain why the accuracy of NRRCs obtained by the third-graders in the present study
still remained very low (only 53.67%, as indicated in Table 7), though proven
2 The result is basically in accordance with the theory of markedness. NRRCs are, by their very nature, a marked structure, and with this markedness comes the implication that not only is this construction more difficult to acquire due to its cognitive complexity but it is also less frequent in the discourse distribution.
significantly better than that of the first-graders.
Finally, instructional effects play a role in the subjects’ acquisition of NRRCs.
In view of potential interference from L1, cognitive complexity of referential
accessibility, and low frequency of NRRC input in text, it becomes all the more
important for classroom instruction to underscore the cross-linguistic difference in
NRRCs between learners’ mother tongue and English, assist learners in better
comprehending the concept of referential accessibility, and enhance the saliency of
features of NRRCs in textual input. To investigate instructional effects, instructional
materials for English, including textbooks of junior and senior high school and
grammar books available on the market, were scrutinized with regard to their
accounts of NRRCs, examples for illustrating how NRRCs are used, and exercises for
practicing NRRCs. The following are some observations made from a survey of
instructional materials in terms of their presentation of English NRRCs.
On the whole, instructional materials have overlooked usage of NRRCs. Most
material writers tend to devote much of the text to expounding how to construct RRCs
with various relative markers, such as relative pronouns (including simple, like which,
who and compound, like what, whoever), relative adverbs, and quasi-relative
pronouns (like as, than, but). Assuming similarities between RRCs and NRRCs in
their formation with relative markers, they are inclined to think it unnecessary to
further explicate usage of NRRCs. Under such circumstances, the presentation of
NRRCs is often neglected and treated as a dispensable, fragmented adjunct to that of
RRCs, merely cramming learners with supplementary facts about how RRCs contrast
with NRRCs in form and meaning. Little information is provided for learners on
how to use NRRCs correctly and appropriately in context.
In addition, instructional materials rarely, if ever, make an attempt to raise
learners’ awareness of the close relationship between NRRCs and referential
accessibility, i.e. the fact that it is essentially the referential status of head NPs, not
other factors, that determines the use or nonuse of NRRCs.
For one thing, instructional materials more often than not present NRRCs merely
with itemized prescriptive rules, common among which are those listed in (83):
(83) Rule 1: There should be commas or other punctuations like parentheses, dashes, setting off the main clause from the NRRC.
Rule 2: The relative marker that cannot be used in an NRRC.
Rule 3: Relative pronouns in the object position of an NRRC cannot further be deleted.
Rule 4: When the antecedent is a personal pronoun, proper NP, or one-of-a-kind NP, an NRRC should be used to modify it.
All these prescriptive rules do little in making learners acutely aware of the
correlation between NRRCs and referential accessibility. Rules 1-3 focus learners’
attention solely on syntactic restrictions with the formation of NRRCs. While rule 4
identifies for learners certain NP contexts for using NRRCs, it does not offer any
explanation for why NRRCs should be used in these NP contexts. When no account
is given of the fact that it is essentially the referential accessibility of these NPs that
obligates the use of NRRCs, rule 4 could give learners the impression that the use of
NRRCs is decided solely upon the presence of such uniqueness-referring NPs as
personal pronouns, proper NPs, one-of-a-kind NPs, rather than the referential status of
NPs.
For another, in introducing NRRCs, instructional materials tend to rely heavily
on context-reduced examples with both restrictive and non-restrictive interpretations,
as in (84):
(84) a. Sam has a daughter who studies in college. (Meaning: Sam has more
than one daughter, and one of them studies in college)
b. Sam has a daughter, who studies in college. (Meaning: Sam has only
one daughter, and she studies in college)
Although examples with parallel sentences like (84) can readily be utilized to make a
direct comparison of RRCs and NRRCs in their meanings, they to a great extent
desensitize learners to the relationship between NRRCs and referential accessibility in
that there is not enough context to accentuate the referential status of the antecedent in
question. These decontextualized examples may very well mislead learners into
thinking that NRRCs are used only with NPs characterized by the connotation of
“being the only one.”
As for exercises for NRRCs, instructional materials, in the main, fail to design
context-embedded exercises to help learners practice using NRRCs according to
whether their antecedents are referentially accessible in context. This is because the
prevalent exercises for NRRCs are sentence-combining, which tends to be
context-reduced, as exemplified in (85):
(85) The storm caused a lot of damage.
Nobody had expected the storm.
(Ans.: The storm, which nobody had expected, caused a lot of damage)
At best, exercises like (85) merely acquaint learners with how to combine two
sentences into an NRRC using appropriate relative markers. They fall short of
equipping learners with knowledge of how to use NRRCs in accordance with context,
as they do not furnish any contextual clues for learners to perceive the referential
accessibility of a given NP and see a need to use an NRRC in preference to an RRC.
To put it another way, instead of sensitizing learners to the relationship between
NRRCs and referential accessibility, sentence-combining only serves to familiarize
them with those prescriptive rules stated in (83), particularly rules 1-3, regarding
structural aspects of NRRCs.
The above inadequacies in the presentation of NRRCs by instructional
materials—neglect of usage of NRRCs, failure to highlight the relationship between
NRRCs and referential accessibility, and lack of contextualized exercises for using
NRRCs with reference to context—may partly be responsible not only for the
subjects’ great confusion between RRCs and NRRCs in their mental grammar of
English RCs, evinced by a tendency to overuse the former, but also for their
insufficient knowledge of when to employ NRRCs, evinced by a propensity to use
NRRCs only with uniqueness-referring NPs to the exclusion of other referentially
accessible NPs.
What is more, instructional effects may even account for why generic NPs were
the only non-lexically accessible NP context that displayed a significant performance
difference between the first- and third-graders, as indicated in Table 10. With more
years of exposure to instruction, the third-graders may have been more familiar with
the prescriptive rule that emphasizes the co-occurrence of NRRCs with
uniqueness-referring NPs (e.g. personal pronouns, proper NPs, and one-of-a-kind
NPs), and thus more able to generalize the use of NRRCs by analogy to generic NPs,
which share a similarity with uniqueness-referring NPs in their semantic meaning of
“particularness”: the former refers to particular classes or categories, and the latter,
particular entities.
4.2.2 Use of RCs in Different Pragmatic/Discourse Contexts －－－－ Identifying, Characterizing, Presentative, and Parenthetical
In the context translation test, it was observed that the subjects’ employment of
RCs were more bound up with the prototypical functions of identifying or
characterizing a referent, and less associated with the atypical functions of presenting
a topic or interpolating parenthetical information. The subjects’ rare use of RCs for
the latter two functions is understandable, considering that generally, EFL instruction
makes few attempts to well acquaint learners with such advanced RC uses.
On the one hand, learners may not be familiar with the presentative use of RCs,
given that the teaching of RCs is often taken up at a sentential level, with little
discourse context to help learners attend to such use. With great emphasis on form,
traditional grammar teaching commonly presents language in isolated, decontexulized
sentences. Despite its merit in helping learners readily discern structural features in
RC formation, such a sentence-based approach to grammar is not conducive to
shedding light on the presentative use of RCs, a function best understood only within
connected stretches of discourse. As an illustration of this point, consider (86):
(86) Each of us can imagine difficulties that could result from the introduction of
a cloned child.
To learners, it would seem that the only function that the underlined RC performs is to
characterize the indefinite head NP difficulties with new information; there is nothing
“presentative” about the RC. Nonetheless, when the same RC is analyzed in larger
discourse, as in text (87) below, the discourse function of RCs is made more explicit
and easier for learners to perceive:
(87) Each of us can imagine difficulties that could result from the introduction of a cloned child. For example, it would be very difficult for the parent that was cloned not to have specific ideas about how the “copy”
(the cloned child) should act and develop. Seeing their own image would make it awfully difficult not to impose expectation on their cloned child.
Conversely, how would the cloned teenager react to the parent, seeing their physical future ahead?
--Ian Wilmu, “To Clone or not Clone: Implications of Human Cloning”
(from Chen, 2004: 24) From text (87), it is clear that besides characterizing, the underlined RC also serves to
present the new NP difficulties into the discourse as a persistent and important referent.
Occurring in the beginning position of a discourse unit, the RC helps mark the new
NP as the topic for the ongoing discourse by furnishing it with a salient initial
description that facilitates subsequent reference. Moreover, it contributes to the
development of this discourse topic by coding information about it that is going to be
further discussed, as can be seen from the remaining sentences of the text, all of
which elaborate on how difficulties could result from child cloning. In short, the
above examples, (86) and (87), simply demonstrate that in the absence of a
discourse-oriented approach, traditional grammar teaching may very well be
responsible for learners’ failure to fully appreciate the presentative function of RCs
and to make good use of RCs in written discourse as an effective strategy for topic
construction.
On the other hand, learners may not be cognizant of the parenthetical use of RCs,
for the presentation of NRRCs often focuses not so much on the function of NRRCs
as on the formal and semantic differences between RRCs and NRRCs. As pointed
out in Section 4.2.1, because of their undue stress on usage of various relative markers
in the formation of RRCs, instructional materials tend to give a rather perfunctory and
simplistic account of NRRCs. At best, their introduction of the construction is
nothing more than a list of features whereby RRCs contrast with NRRCs; they
scarcely ever go further to draw learners’ attention to the information-adding function
of NRRCs themselves. With the under-teaching of NRRCs in EFL instruction,
learners are merely crammed with facts about how RRCs and NRRCs differ from
each other, and they may not have the slightest idea of when to use NRRCs.
Unaware of such a device, more sophisticated than independent clauses, at their
disposal to provide supplementary facts, remarks, or explanations, learners are very
likely to end up underusing NRRCs in expressing their stream of thoughts.
In addition to their under-learning of RC functions, the subjects’ sporadic use of
RCs in presentative and parenthetical contexts, as revealed by a close examination of
their translation in the test, also has something to do with their propensity to use
independent clauses in place of RCs for such contexts. The finding implicates that
when expressing themselves in English, the subjects still had a tendency to transfer
the same structure as used in their mother tongue, Chinese, into English, wrongly
assuming that Chinese and English employed the same syntactic strategy to achieve a
particular communicative function. In fact, because of their distinctive pragmatic
features, Chinese and English differ from each other in their preferred structure for
presentative and parenthetical contexts. A discourse-oriented language, Chinese is
characterized by a topic chain, which is syntactically realized as a series of
independent clauses, with the first clause serving as a common topic and the rest
making comments about it. Under this topic chain, the structure preferred in
Chinese for presentative and parenthetical contexts is often a pair of independent
clauses strung together, with the first one being commented on by the second (Lin,
2002: 108-109). By contrast, English, a sentence-oriented language, typically
utilizes different sentence structures to accommodate different kinds of information.
In English, there is nothing wrong with using independent clauses for presentative and
parenthetical contexts; however, in terms of information packaging (as well as
stylistic considerations), RCs are more preferred: RCs used in a presentative context
serve to “spotlight” (i.e. foreground) the important information about a topical
referent that is going to be further developed in the subsequent discourse, while those
used in a parenthetical context help to “sidelight” (i.e. background) the supplementary
information in order to distinguish it from the main assertion, coded in an independent
clause. Probably because such a cross-linguistic difference in preferred structure is
too subtle to perceive, nearly half of the subjects in the study still viewed independent
clauses, the same structure used in Chinese, as appropriate structural counterparts in
English for presenting a topical referent or inserting additional information; seldom
did it cross their mind that in English, there exists an alternative structure, i.e. RCs,
that is used much more commonly for presentative and parenthetical contexts.
Finally, with regard to their use of articles with RCs in a characterizing context,
the subjects were found to exhibit a certain tendency to misuse the definite article
with characterizing RCs. The finding can partially be seen to provide empirical
support for the researcher’s observation concerning the influence of false instruction,
which motivates the second part of the second research question. As briefly pointed
out in Chapter three, quite often, especially in learning when to use the definite article,
learners have been told to use the definite article before NPs with RCs. This
learners have been told to use the definite article before NPs with RCs. This