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This study aims to investigate the discourse functions https://www.51lunwen.org/languagethesis/ of English restrictive relative clauses in writings by native speakers of English as well as the use of them by Chinese college students.
From the lens of syntax, semantics, pragmatics and discourse, this paper investigates how the discourse functions of English restrictive relative clauses are related to their occurrences in discourse structures. The study shows that most restrictive relative clauses lie in the beginning of the whole sentences and they are often guided to their new antecedent as the subject of discourse, because they perform a very important function to introduce new information.
This study examines the acquisition of English relative clauses by Chinese learners and their uses of relative clauses in writings, further disclosing the discourse functions of relative clauses and their situational use.
From the analyses of relative clauses taken from 120 college students, who are my students, as the source of the data analyses, and the use of the frequency calculation and text analysis to qualitative analyses, the present study indicates that Chinese college students commonly use relative clauses in their writings and they largely have acquired the usage of English relative clauses except the restrictive and non-restrictive functions. However, the specific forms of use of relative clauses in their writings have not been mastered completely. Besides, it also finds that relative clauses in Chinese college students’ writings serve three main discourse functions—given entity grounding, proposition-linking grounding, and description. In the situational use of relative clauses, Chinese college students generally use relative clauses to state study backgrounds, purposes, and define terms in the section of introduction in their writings. In the section of literature review, relative clauses are used in elaborating concepts, presenting extra information, and confining topics for discussion. And in the section of methodology including a pilot study, relative clauses are used in describing background information about subjects, delimiting subject scope, indicating sources of collected data and measures given to subjects, and expressing analytical focuses and theoretical foundations employed; when study results and conclusions are stated, relative clauses are used to identify sources of analyzed data.
The findings of this study show Chinese college students still have difficulty in distinguishing restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses and overuse restrictive relative clauses. These show that they haven’t mastered the discourse functions of English restrictive relative clauses.
In the discourse functions, description function is predominantly used in Chinese college students’ writings, but it is incorrectly used with the restrictive form of relative clauses. Besides, the students have not totally learnt the commonly used forms of relative clauses in academic writing. Thus, it was suggested that instructors introduce the concepts of grounding and description in relative clauses to help students better understand the restrictive and non-restrictive functions and teach them the academically common forms of use relative clauses in the class of academic writing. Apart from 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。