A Data-based Analysis of OS-type Relative Clauses in English

Abstract

The purpose of this study is two-hold: 1) to examine the distributional patterns of OS-type relative clauses (henceforth, OS-types) and 2) to identify the linguistic factors that characterize the extensive use of OS-types in English discourse. The structural patterns and pragmatic tendencies of OS-types are analyzed in the light of the three linguistic aspects of information processing; 1) newness, 2) heavyness, 3) a SVO word order. A tight correlation between newness and OS-types tells us that the use of OS-types might be one of effective constituent orderings that contributes to the manifestation of the principle of end-focus, which leads to the interplay of ‘given-before-new’ in language-use situations. Another relationship between heavy-NP shifts and OS-types suggests that the grammatical structure or constituent ordering of OS-types are optimally matched to English language users’ language parsing capacity. In addition, the linear, or canonical word order of OS-type structural connections explains why new heavy long and complex constituents tend to be directed towards the sentence-final position and OS-types. Thus, a general claim supported by the findings from this study is that the extensive use of OS-types is closely related to the effectiveness of information processing, and thus OS-types are likely to be preferred or selected for the purpose of facilitating English language users’ language production and comprehension.