Defining Relative Clauses in Chinese Researchers' Academic Writings

Relative clauses are an important index of a non-native writer's command of English. This article reports an investigation of Chinese researchers' use of defining relative clauses with 'which' in academic writings through a corpus-based comparative analysis. A corpus of Chinese researchers' recent academic writings (CCRAW) is first constructed. A sub-corpus of academic writings in British Academic Written English (BA WE) is taken as a reference corpus. The overall distributions of four types of defining relative clauses, namely SU (subject clause), DO (direct object clause), 10 (indirect object clause) and PREP (preposition clause) are under investigation in this paper. The research findings show that the frequencies of DO and PREP of defining RCs in CCRAW are significantly different from BA WE. Potential causes for the distribution characteristics of RCs with 'which' in CCRAW are discussed. Some pedagogical suggestions are given at the end of the paper.