Relative Clauses in Hong Kong English: A Corpus-based Perspective

This study, with the help of the International Corpus of English, contrastively explores uses of relative clauses by students in Hong Kong, Singapore and British English within the framework of world Englishes (Kachru, 2005, 1989; Kachru & Nelson, 2006). First, in the Hong Kong data, there is probably a tendency to use restrictive relative clauses led by WHICH in places where non-restrictive relative clauses led by WHICH are normally expected. Second, there is another tendency in the employment of non-restricted relative clauses led by THAT in Hong Kong university students' written work and it is interesting to note that this phenomenon seems to be more widespread in Hong Kong student writing than in Singapore student writing and no such cases were found out in the British subcorpus. Given that some distinctive patterns traditionally considered as developmental errors in the language learning process may also be seen as evidence of linguistic variations, second language teachers may need some tolerance towards this variation and compromise between "autonomy" and "grammaticality" in today's society of world Englishes (McKay, 2008).