Use of Relative Clauses in Writing
In another study, this one a large-scale corpus analysis of three written registers or genres (editorials, fiction,letters),Biber, Conrad, and Reppen (1994) found that relative clauses and participles are not nearly as frequent as prepositional phrases if all postnominal adjectival are examined. These researchers thus argue against any extensive decontextualized instruction of difficult grammatical constructions such as relative clauses when there may be other simpler constructions that might be more frequent and more useful to learners. That suggest that it important to teach intermediate and advanced learners the linguistic patterns that occur in the registers or genres the students will encounter in actual language use since no single set of linguistic features will be appropriate for all students.
There have been other corpus-based studies of relative clause in written English such as Olofsson (1981),who used the Brown University corpus to uncover some oddities of lexical co-occurrence in relative clause. For example, when euery modifies the head noun, the relativized object is virtually always deleted; for example:
Every man we saw had a tattoo.
When body parts function as head nouns, the relativized subject is that rather than which significantly more frequently than with other types of lexical items functioning as head nouns: for example:
She was a girl in a sunbonnet with eyes that flashed at the guests.
When body parts function as head nouns, the relativized subject is that rather than which significantly more frequently than with other types of lexical items functioning as head nouns: for example:
She was a girl in a sunbonnet with eyes that flashed at the guests.