Exploring a Diachronic Change in the Use of English Relative Clauses: A Corpus-Based Study and Its Implication for Pedagogy

This corpus-based diachronic study aims to investigate the change in the use of English relative clauses over a 45-year time span. It does not only focus on change over time but also change between two varieties of English (British and American). The data were taken from the Brown family of corpora. Each corpus in the Brown family corpora consists of 500 texts of approximately 2,000 words of written published standard English. The finding indicates that the overall trend of the use of relative clauses in written texts has largely decreased in both American and British English. The frequency of the relative which has experienced a sharp decline in both English and American varieties but the relative pronoun that has dramatically increased. This trend suggests the move toward colloquialization, meaning that both the English varieties tend to employ less formal or speech-like style in written texts. The pedagogical implication of this research is that it can bring about a change in syllabuses and materials of English language teaching (ELT), particularly for teaching general writing by taking into account colloquialization hypothesis.