Syntactic Interpretations of Noun Phrases Used with the Relativizers Which and That in English Novels
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Abstract
This study examined the syntactic interpretations of noun phrases (NPs) used with the relativizers which and that in English novels. Whilst previous studies focusing on the study of NPs occurring with the relativizers which and that selected the data from academic articles, English news and writing of EFL learners, this study contributes to the field by examining their use in English novels. This study selected eight best-seller English novels, including Persuasion (Austen, 2018), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Doyle, 2019), Frankenstein (Shelley, 2019), The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien, 2020), Treasure Island (Stevenson, 2019), A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens, 2021), Little Women (Alcott, 2019) and The Mayor of Casterbridge (Hardy, 2021). The data contains approximately 400,000 words which provide 121 tokens of relative clauses used with the relativizers which and that. The data analysis follows Radford’s (2009) generative grammar to study the patterns of relativizers. The classifications of nouns in this study follow Santhalunai and Vijaya (2020). The results show that the use of the relativizers that and which is 23.97 percent and 76.03 percent, respectively. The differences between the two are that the relativizer which in English novels is preferred to be used with NPs, which have the syntactic interpretations of concrete nouns, such as envelope and notepaper. However, the relativizer that in English novels is preferred to be used with NPs that have the syntactic interpretations of abstract nouns, such as experience. It is expected that the findings in this study can be beneficial in the sense that they provide EFL and ESL learners with more examples of how to use the relativizers that and which in a sentence.
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