Structural properties and discourse-pragmatic functions of adnominal and sentential english relative clauses in oral narratives produced by adult native speakers of british english

Abstract

To date, most of the existing standard grammatical descriptions of the English language have used decontextualised written sentence tokens as their primary source of data. However, these standard grammatical descriptions have overlooked the complexities of the constructions and patterns which can be normally found in oral interactions. The present research study aims to determine the defining structural properties and discourse-pragmatic functions of adnominal and sentential English relative clauses in spontaneous oral narratives produced by adult native speakers of British English. For this purpose, 110 relative clauses which were gathered from 4 interviews collected from an online British database of real life personal narratives of health and illness experiences were analysed. Results show that some instances of adnominal relative clauses and sentential relative clauses differ structurally from relative clauses commonly found in written English for such factors as the proximity between the antecedent and the relative clause, on the one hand, and the role of ellipsis in spoken interactions, on the other hand. It was also found that relative clauses in spoken interactions can be considered supra-sentential units which serve six different discourse pragmatic functions: narrative, evaluative, argumentative, reporting, descriptive and informative.