A Study on Relative Clauses and Participle Clauses Used as English Post-nominal Modifiers

초록

Korean learners, who use participle clauses much less frequently than native speakers, should be helped to use them more frequently by showing them the linguistic features of relative and participle clauses and the factors that cause the difference. The purpose of this study is to compare the distribution and preference of relative clauses(RC) and participle clauses(PC) and analyze any factors affecting the selection of RC and PC. To this end, the paper has extracted a total of 6,400 tokens, consisting of 400 tokens each across eight genres in COCA, with 3,200 tokens accounting for each in RC and PC. The factors that influence the preference for one over the other are as follows. First, syntactic properties such as syntactic type of antecedents(SS), and lengthy antecedents induce the combination with RC more frequently. Second, semantic properties like ‘animacy’ and semantic domain type of antecedents and verbs are revealed to be related to the choice of RC and PC. Finally, the different distribution of RC and PC in active and passive voice as well as in spoken and written registers reflect discourse properties. To sum up, the particular type of postnominal modifier is preferred due to processing advantages such as effectiveness of message presentation and information flow by using either RC with relative pronouns or PC with no relative pronouns.

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