A Cognitive-Functional Account for Relative Clauses in Discourse

초록

From a cognitive-functional perspective, this study examines the cognitive effects of relative clauses in discourse. The main purpose of this study is to identify a correlation between the grammatical roles of relative clauses and their pragmatically motivated functions. To identify the pragmatic factors that govern the choice of particular types of relative clauses and their cognitive effects on their occurrence in discourse, we analyzed the distributional patterns and the frequency of occurrence of particular types of relative clauses in discourse. The findings from the data analysis reveal that the discourse-oriented tendencies of particular types of relative clauses in relation to the location of relative clauses, the choice of a particular type of relative clause, and the length of relative clauses reflect human language processing and cognitive-pragmatic strategies, minimizing the complexity of relative clauses and the load of sentence processing. Finally, this study proposes that a more cognitively accessible linguistic structure implies more frequent use in discourse, lessening the complexity of human language processing.

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