英语论文网

In recent years, studies on relative clauses have focused on the explanation of English relative clauses from discourse perspectives. [1] They employ the notion ‘information flow’ to account for how English relative clauses perform their discourse functions in conversation. Fox and Thompson (1990) define information flow as “referring to the interactional determined choices that speakers make which determine intonational, grammatical, and lexical choices”. [2] That is, speakers convey the given and new information by means of syntactic constructions, intonation in written texts are new referents whereas spoken texts go to the contrary. Moreover, even though both written and spoken discourses have very clear discourse boundaries, they mark their discourse boundaries in different ways. For example, written discourse has greater reliance on discourse markers such as conjuncts and subordinators to mark the boundaries, whereas spoken discourse contains more interactive markers, planning fillers or paratones to indicate the boundaries. [3]Based on these differences, we believe that the use of English restrictive relative clauses in written discourse may involve factors not found in the studies on conversations.https://www.51lunwen.org/languagethesis/

本研究只调查了英语限制性书面论述和论证中的有关条款，原因有三点。首先，本研究只局限于限制性的有关条款，不包括非限制性关系从句。

The present study only investigates English restrictive relative clauses in written expositions and argumentations for three reasons. Firstly, the present study is only confined to restrictive relative clauses, not including non-restrictive relative clauses, because a restrictive relative clause is a restrictive modifier which restricts the set of objects referred to by the head NP to a subset of objects with the property ascribed by the restrictive relative clause. A restrictive relative clause thus forms a single constituent with its head NP and bears close relation with its head NP. By contrast, a non-restrictive relative clause serves to provide additional parenthetical information about the head NP. It does not narrow down the domain of its head NP, thereby not being used as a restrictive modifier and not forming a single constituent with its head NP. Secondly, the findings of the discourse functions of English restrictive relative clauses are mainly from spontaneous conversations and written narrations. To the best of my knowledge, no studies have been found on the discourse functions of English restrictive relative clauses in written expositions and argumentations. Finally, the reason for us to take written expositions and argumentations for our data analysis is that writers of these two genres need to drawn upon evidences to support their opinions or inform the reader by piecing together information from various sources .[4]Therefore, the two genres usually contain newly introduced information. Based on the characteristic, we want to know how English restrictive relative clauses manifest their discourse functions in the two genres.