The productive preference for Spanish relative clauses by Chinese learners of Spanish as a foreign language: an empirical investigation from a typological perspective

Abstract

The Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy established by Keenan and Comrie (1977) reveals that subject relative clause (The lady who works in the United Nations is a specialist in political journalism) is easier to relativize in comparison to direct object relative clause (The man that we just hired has abundant communicative competence). The present article aims to investigate, through the lens of the NPAH and by means of sentence combination tasks, whether Chinese learners of Spanish as a foreign language indeed prefer to produce subject relative clauses (N=55). The obtained results indicates that in reference to Chinese learners of Spanish as a foreign language, there is a discernible preference for producing subject relative clauses, which attains statistical significance. Moreover, the results of the error analysis could contribute to the teaching and learning of Spanish relative clauses in the Chinese educational context.