A revisit of three hypotheses about second language development of English relative clauses

Abstract

Abstract Cantonese-English learners in Hong Kong confront with substantial difficulty in development of English relative clauses. This study aims at verifying predictions of hypotheses about second language learners’ development of English relative clauses with data of written Hong Kong English. wh relatives and that relatives in the Hong Kong component of the International Corpus of English were identified. Frequencies of occurrence of distinct types of relative clauses in the Hong Kong component were compared to evaluate whether predictions of Keenan and Comrie’s (1977) Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy, Kuno’s (1974) Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis, and Hamilton’s (1994) Subject-Object Hierarchy Hypothesis are supported by the corpus data respectively. Results indicate that the Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis is supported by data of written Hong Kong English whilst the other two hypotheses are partially supported only. Hypotheses supported by corpus data of written Hong Kong English are suggested to inform English language education in Hong Kong by illuminating the instructional order of different types of English relative clauses.