A Corpus-based Analysis on the Factors Conditioning the Selection of Relative Pronoun That and Which in Newspaper
Eun‐Young Jang · 언어학 연구 · 2014
This paper aims to discover the factors affecting the choice of relative pronoun that and which in terms of a cognitive and discourse functional aspect. To achieve the goal, we collected 264 relative clauses in which that and which appear in BNC1 corpus under the same conditions as follows: 1) non-human antecedents, 2) no preceding prepositions, and 3) restrictive usage. Our finding shows that SS type that appears much more frequently contrary to what Fox and Thompson (1990) asserted. Another finding is that if the structures of antecedents are complex such as [NP, NP] and [NP + PP], then which more often emerges. The results reveal that the choice of relative pronoun is closely associated with cognitive strategies which enable us to easily access to difficult and complex sentences.