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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Relative clauses
• Hong Kong English
• corpus linguistics
• untimed student essays

Acknowledgement

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Carmen Lee and Honorary Professor Gerald Nelson from the Department of English, The Chinese University of Hong Kong for their supervision of this research project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chi Wui Ng

Chi Wui Ng is a versatile Hong Kong Chinese who is a doctoral student in the Academic Unit of Social Contexts and Policies of Education, the University of Hong Kong. Prior to commencement of his doctoral studies, he completed a co-terminal double degree programme in English Studies and English Language Education along with a Linguistics minor during his undergraduate studies and completed a research Master’s degree in Applied English Linguistics while serving as a full-time Graduate Master in aided secondary schools in Hong Kong. His research interests in the field of educational studies are higher education, doctoral education, and social reproduction whilst his research interests in the field of applied linguistics are English grammar, second language development, second language instruction, pedagogical grammar, grammar of Hong Kong English, and corpus linguistics.