Relative Clauses and Subject-drop in KSL Learners' Writing: Sentence Processing Approach

Abstract

This paper investigates acquisition of Korean relative clauses by KSL (Korean as a Second language) learners, testing Keenan & Comrie's (1977)accessibility hierarchy of relativization and Wolfe-Quintero's (1998) two-tier analysis of relative clauses. An analysis of KSL learners' free composition data revealed that KSL learners produced subject relative clauses more frequently than object relative clauses confirming the prediction of Keenan and Comrie's relativization hierarchy. However, KSL learners produced more S-tier types (i.e., relative clauses modifying a subject of the main clause) than O-tier types (i.e., relative clauses modifying an object of the main clause), which does not conform to the Wolfe-Quintero's accessibility hierarchy based on English data. Such tendency was found very similar to that of the native control group. The reason for this is ascribed to the processing difficulty of center-embedding of the relative clauses. It is proposed that the S-tier is easy to process in a left-branching language like Korean while the O-tier is easy in a right-branching language like English. This is due to the avoidance of center-embedded structures which cause processing difficulty and reduce comprehensibility of the sentence. Several kinds of strategies to avoid center-embedding such as pro-drop, topicalization, and heavy pp shift were also suggested. The language users seem to try to find ways to reduce the processing load when they have to use complex structures such as relative clauses. This finding supports the perceptual difficulty hypothesis.