Abstract
This research study is focused on the use of the relativizer that occurring in authentic learner English. The data, collected from Thai Learner English Corpus (TLEC), indicated that the majority of the relative clauses (RCs) beginning with that functioned as a relative pronoun rather than a relative adverb. In terms of the order of difficulty of RC types, the most problematic seemed to be the genitive relative, followed by the object-of-preposition relative and the direct-object relative respectively. The most accessible RC type was the subject relative. These findings provided support for the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (Keenan & Comrie, 1977). The results also demonstrated that Thai EFL learners in producing that-RCs were faced with common errors, e.g. pronominal reflexes, null-prep constructions, and a lack of comma as well as occurrences of that in non-restrictive RCs.
Author Information
Supakorn Phoocharoensil, Thammasat University, Thailand
Paper Information
Conference: ACEID2015
Stream: Linguistics and pedagogy
This paper is part of the ACEID2015 Conference Proceedings (View)
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