Exploring a Diachronic Change in the Use of English Relative Clauses: A Corpus-Based Study and Its Implication for Pedagogy

Abstract

This corpus-based diachronic study aims to investigate the change in the use of English relative clauses over a 45-year time span. It does not only focus on change over time but also change between two varieties of English (British and American). The data were taken from the Brown family of corpora. Each corpus in the Brown family corpora consists of 500 texts of approximately 2,000 words of written published standard English. The finding indicates that the overall trend of the use of relative clauses in written texts has largely decreased in both American and British English. The frequency of the relative which has experienced a sharp decline in both English and American varieties but the relative pronoun that has dramatically increased. This trend suggests the move toward colloquialization, meaning that both the English varieties tend to employ less formal or speech-like style in written texts. The pedagogical implication of this research is that it can bring about a change in syllabuses and materials of English language teaching (ELT), particularly for teaching general writing by taking into account colloquialization hypothesis.

Google Books Corpus and designing English for specific purposes materials

“…However, Corpus linguistics technologies provide free access to authentic materials that can be adapted according to the need of specific language students, as illustrated in previous sections. The results of this study are in line with the findings of other researchers (e.g., Fajri & Okwar, 2020;Motschenbacher, 2020). Corpus linguistics techniques are useful to highlighted the frequent language structures in any specific discipline.…”

“…First, the corpus shows the most frequent grammar rules among different registers. For example, Fajri and Okwar (2020) found that the frequency of the relative 'which' has declined in English writing, but the relative pronoun 'that' has noticeably increased. Also, Motschenbacher (2020) found that corpus is a powerful tool to verify the linguistic characteristics of names as they surface in actual language use, especially at the semantic and grammatical levels.…”

Testing for proficiency effects and crosslinguistic influence in L2 processing: Filler-gap dependencies in L2 English by Jordanian-Arabic and Mandarin speakers

“…In our study, this was the relative pronoun that , whereas in Kim et al, which also used subject-relative-clause islands, the relative pronoun was who. Analysis of written English corpora shows that that is increasingly more frequent as a relative clause marker than who (Fajri & Okwar, 2020), which could mean the island structure was easier to identify in our sentences than in Kim et al’s, though further research is needed to test this suggestion. Alternatively, the grammar of the L1 may make a difference.…”

Compressed and Implicit Syntactic Features of L2 English Academic Research Writing by Filipino Research Writers Across Disciplines: a Cross-Analysis

“…On the one hand, current research on compressed and implicit syntactic features has focused more on L1 English research writers (e.g., Al Fajri & Okwar, 2020;Biber, Gray et al, 2016;Cho & Lee, 2016;Gray, 2015;Hyland & Jiang, 2017;Kim & Crosthwaite, 2019;Lu et al, 2020). On the other hand, a scarcity of studies concentrating on L2 English research writers exists (e.g., Ruan, 2018;Wu et al, 2020;Yin et al, 2021).…”