Development of the relative clause among Chinese-speaking learners of Korean

The development of relative clauses (RCs) has been examined through various theoretical frameworks, including the Markedness Hypothesis, the Surface Configuration Hypothesis, the Dependency Locality Theory, and the Absolutive Hypothesis. This study tested these hypotheses using 18 months of spontaneous spoken data collected from Chinese-speaking learners of Korean. A total of 1,178 sentences containing RCs were extracted and analyzed. The study investigated the frequency of occurrence, the timing of initial emergence, and the syntactic error rates of different RC patterns over time. Predicate types were classified based on their obligatory arguments, and the frequency and error rates for each type were examined.  Additionally, the study examined the distribution of predicate types, as well as the relationship between predicate types and the grammatical roles played by head nouns within the relative clause. The results revealed that among the 1,178 RCs, subject RCs occurred most frequently, followed by direct object and oblique RCs. However, no clear differences were observed between direct object RCs and oblique RCs in terms of their timing of appearance and error rates. These results suggest that the Markedness Hypothesis, the Surface Configuration Hypothesis, and the Dependency Locality Theory may have limitations in explaining the observed patterns. Notably, the study found that RCs involving predicates with simpler argument structures were acquired more easily than those with more complex ones. Specifically, the developmental sequence of RCs followed this order: intransitive verbs without obligatory oblique arguments > transitive verbs > intransitive verbs with obligatory oblique arguments > ditransitive verbs. Overall, the results support the Absolutive Hypothesis in explaining the development of RCs across different predicate types.