Ahlem Ammar and Patsy M. Lightbown
A substantial body of second language acquisition research has revealed that learners who are taught marked relative clauses (RCs) can acquire the less marked ones without instruction on them. On the basis of this research, Hamilton (1994) proposed the Implicational Generalization Hypothesis (IGH), i.e., that knowledge of more marked forms implies the knowledge of less marked ones. In this study three experimental groups of Arabic speakers learning English as a foreign language were taught RC types with different levels of markedness. On posttest measures the experi-mental groups showed better command of relativization than a control group. The IGH was supported in that students generalized their knowl-edge of relative clauses to RC types that were implicated by the ones that were taught. However, students also generalized to some RC types that were more marked, and thus not implicated by the ones they were taught.
This finding adds to Hamilton’s questions about the unidircctionality of the IGH.
More about the acquisition of relative clauses by Arab learners of English
The question of whether explicit language-focused instruction is beneficial for the second language learner has been investigated from a number of different angles. One set of studies has examined the effects of form-focused instruction on the rate and sequence of acquisition of relative clauses in a second language. Some researchers have investigated the acceleration of learning that may result from teaching relative clauses that are more “marked” according to the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (see below). The first hypothesis shared by several studies was that instruc-tion that focused on a marked structure might lead learners to generalize such that they would acquire not only that structure but also the less
marked structures, without specific instruction on them. Related to this was a second hypothesis, that generalization was unidirectional, that is, learners would acquire the taught structures and the less marked but not the more marked relativization types.
Considerable support for the first hypothesis has been provided by Gass (1982), Eckman, Bell and Nelson (1988), and Doughty (1991). In those studies, learners who received instruction on a marked relative clause type learnt that clause type and generalized this knowledge to the less marked types implicated by it. Findings regarding the unidirectionality hypothesis are less conclusive. Researchers found that some learners generalized new knowledge not only to the less marked but also to some more marked rela-tive clause types. This unexpected generalization was usually considered to be either insignificant or exceptional.
In light of these findings, the present study was designed to further investigate both the effectiveness of instruction and the directionality of any generalizations.
The Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy
After analysing data from 50 languages, Keenan and Comrie (1977) found that noun phrases in different positions (subject (SU), direct object (DO), indirect object (IO), object of preposition (OPREP), genitive (GEN) and object of comparison (OCOMP)) are relativized according to a hierarchical ordering. The Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH) reflects the typological relationship they found among the relativizable syntactic posi-tions of noun phrases in the languages they analyzed. According to the NPAH, the order of relativization is as follows, where “<” is read as “more accessible than” or “implicated by”.
SU < DO < IO < OPREP < GEN < OCOMP
According to Keenan and Comrie (1977) these relativization types are im-plicationally related such that if a language allows relativization on a given position (e. g. OPREP), it also allows relativization on the positions to its left (in this case the IO, DO, and SU). The hierarchy is also described as an implicational scale of markedness. Keenan (1975: 138) explains that there may be some sense in which it is ‘easier’ or more ‘natural’” for relative clauses to be formed on the positions on the left than those on the right.
Gass (1982) provided the following English examples to illustrate each relativization type.
SU The man who saw the cat…
DO The man that the cat saw…
IO The man that I gave the book to…
OPREP The table that he is standing on…
GEN The man whose book I borrowed…
OCOMP The man that he is taller than…
The Implicational Generalization Hypothesis
Studies of L2 relativization led to what Hamilton (1991) called the Implica-tional Generalization Hypothesis (IGH). Hamilton had earlier used the term
“Markedness Generalization Hypothesis”, but chose to use “Implicational Generalization Hypothesis” to avoid an association with “universals or Universal Grammar, an association not necessarily warranted by the data”
(Hamilton 1994: 152, footnote 1). The IGH posits two main hypotheses.
First, once one relativization type has been acquired, generalization to the ones implicated by it will also take place. The generalization is unidirec-tional such that no unimplicated (more marked) relative clause types are acquired. Second, the generalization is hypothesized to be maximal. That is, all RC types implicated by the instructed level will be acquired.
Research testing the Implicational Generalization Hypothesis
Gass (1982) investigated the extent to which L2 learners can acquire a less marked relativization when instruction is provided only on a more marked position. Eighteen low-intermediate ESL students whose native languages were Arabic, Italian, Russian, and Spanish were divided into one experi-mental group (n=13) that was taught OPREP and one control group (n=5) that was taught RCs following the order of presentation in Krohn (1977).
According to Gass, “…[in Krohn] the first relative clause types taught [are]
subject and objects. Indirect object relative clauses are part of the category entitled objects. Genitives are introduced following these relative clause types, and with less emphasis” (Gass 1982: 132). Participants were pre-tested three days before instruction began and postpre-tested two days after the instructional intervention ended by means of a sentence combination task and a grammaticality judgement task. The instruction was given in three half-hour sessions spread over a week and supplemented with homework
tasks. A comparison between the pretest and the posttest scores revealed that most learners (11/13) in the experimental group learned the OPREP relativization and generalized this knowledge to the less marked RCs, which were not taught. The control group’s learning was limited to the RC types that were taught in class. Furthermore, some of the experimental learners generalized their learning not only to the less marked, but also to a more marked RC type (OCOMP) This finding contradicts the hypothesized unidirectionality of the IGH. Gass attributed this outcome to stranding. She explains that stranding the comparative “than” might have been interpreted by the subjects to be similar to stranding prepositions in the IO and OPREP relative clause types. However, when it came to the eight students who generalized to the unimplicated GEN by using ‘who his’ instead of
‘whose’, Gass acknowledged that these students might have generalized their learning to the GEN. She points out that errors of relative marker morphology for GEN were likely due to the fact that “the genitive marker
‘whose’ can not be intuited” (Gass 1982: 138).
In a replication of Gass’s (1982) study, Eckman, Bell and Nelson (1988) investigated L2 learners’ ability to generalize to less and more marked RC positions once one specific position was taught. Eckman, Bell and Nelson grouped 36 low-intermediate and intermediate students, who were enrolled in an ESL intensive program, in three experimental groups and one control group. Each experimental group was taught one RC type (one was taught SU, the other DO, and the third OPREP), and the control group was taught techniques of combining sentences that were not related to RCs. Instruc-tion lasted one hour for each group, and consisted of a) a form-focused demonstration of sentence combining, b) oral exercises, and c) written exercises. Subjects’ knowledge of English relativization was evaluated by means of a sentence combination task. The tests included only RCs that corresponded to the ones taught in the three experimental interventions i.e., SU, DO and OPREP. Three major findings were reported. First, partici-pants not only learned the RC type they were taught, but also the ones implicated by it. Second, all groups did best on the structure targeted by the instruction they received. Third, the SU instructed group showed some gains with respect to the unimplicated DO. Their total error rate decreased on the posttest, but Eckman et al. did not mention whether this difference was significant. The SU group did not generalize to the OPREP type and neither did the DO group.
In an investigation of the effectiveness of meaning-oriented versus rule-oriented instruction, Doughty (1991) tested the generalization that was hypothesized to result from teaching a more marked RC types. Although
her study dealt with a variety of issues, only findings related to the general-ization question will be reported here. Twenty intermediate adult ESL learners of various L1s were randomly assigned to two experimental groups and a control group. Using a time controlled computer program, Doughty was able to control two important variables, namely the amount of time and the type of instruction given to each group. The two experimen-tal groups received instruction in ten periods spread over ten days. This was incorporated within lessons designed to build reading comprehension skills. The two experimental groups were assisted in comprehension, either by being given lexical or semantic rephrasing (the meaning-oriented group) or by being given grammatical instruction on relativization (the rule-oriented group). The RC type targeted in the instruction was OPREP. The control group was simply given more time to read.
Participants were tested by means of oral and written tasks. The latter consisted of a grammaticality judgement task devised by Doughty, a sen-tence-combining task adapted from Gass (1982), another sentence combin-ing task borrowed from Ioup (1983), and a grammaticality judgement task adapted from Gass (1982). The oral measure consisted of a picture elicitation task adapted from Hyltenstam (1984). Using a 70 % acquisition criterion, Doughty reports the same pattern of results that emerged from Gass (1982) and Eckman, Bell and Nelson (1988). Instruction targeting OPREP relative clauses permitted most participants to generalize to the uninstructed, but implicated, levels of the NPAH. Moreover, like some subjects from the Gass (1982) study, some subjects generalized to the unimplicated OCOMP relativization. Doughty (1988) pointed out that the mother tongues of the subjects who generalized to the unimplicated OCOMP disallowed that rel-ativization type, thus ruling out the possibility of transfer. Doughty con-cluded that these subjects really did project what they learnt from OPREP instruction to the OCOMP. She summarizes the findings of previous research as well as her own:
At this point in the research, only one conclusion is clear-cut: instruction incorporating unmarked data generalizes only to unmarked contexts, whereas instruction incorporating marked data potentially generalizes not only to that marked context but to other contexts as well. How and why this happens are important topics for future research. (Doughty 1988: 52) The inconclusive findings regarding both unidirectionality and maximality led Hamilton (1994) to further investigate the issue. In his study, Hamilton chose to use a different hierarchy, one that proposes an implicational rela-tionship between four types of relativisation according to roles of the target
noun phrases (NPs) in both the main clause and the relative clause. In this hierarchy
the first code … refers to the head noun as either subject (S) or direct object (O) of the matrix clause, and the second code refers to the role of the NP target of relativization within the relative clause [Only the latter had been considered in the earlier related studies.]:
OS They saw the boy who entered the room.
OO A man bought the clock that the woman wanted.
SS The man who needed a job helped the woman.
SO The dog that the woman owns bit the cat. (Hamilton 1994: 134)
Hamilton then proposed that the implicational relationship would be OS < OO / SS < SO
where < means “implicated by”. Hamilton draws on work by O’Grady (1987) and Doughty (1988) in discussing the processing basis for this hier-archy. Basically, the more an RC type creates discontinuous processing, the more difficult it will be. Thus, for example, SO is considered most difficult because multiple discontinuities are created between syntactic units.(See also Kuno 1974; Ioup & Kruse 1977; Schumann 1980; Sheldon 1974 for discussions of this hierarchy, sometimes with different predictions about level of difficulty).
Hamilton divided 33 low-intermediate and intermediate adult ESL learners into three experimental groups (8 subjects each) and one control group (9 subjects). The three experimental groups received instruction in SO, SS, or OS relativization. The control group received instruction in sen-tence combining using correlative conjunctions. Each of the four groups was instructed for 45 minutes on each of 2 consecutive days.
Learners were pretested two weeks before the instruction began, and posttested two to three days after instruction ended by means of a written sentence combining task. Using an 80 % acquisition criterion, Hamilton reported two main findings. Participants showed gains in almost every case on the instructed RC type, and in certain cases on those types implicated by them. More importantly, however, two OS students generalized to the more difficult types (in one case, to OO, and in the other to both SS and SO – OO having been acquired already on the pretest). This is illustrated in Table 1.
Table 1. Hamilton (1991, 1994) Pre- and post-instructional levels:
Sentence combining task
Learner OS < OO / SS < SO
SO-instructed group 1 + 0 0 0
2 X + + 0
3 0 0 + +
4 X + + +
5 0 0 + +
6 X X + +
7 X X + +
8 X X + +
SS-instructed group 9 + 0 0 0
10 + + 0 0
11 X + 0 0
12 X + 0 0
13 X X 0 0
14 0 0 + 0
15 X 0 X 0
16 X X X 0
OS-instructed group 17 + 0 0 0
18 + 0 0 0
19 + 0 0 0
20 X 0 0 0
21 – 0 0 0
22 + + 0 0
23 + X + +
24 X X 0 0
(Adapted from Hamilton 1994: 139)
X = already acquired on pretest and maintained on posttest; + = newly acquired on posttest; – = newly lost on posttest; 0 = never acquired.
Hamilton concludes that the evidence for unidirectionality is still “some-what ambiguous”. As for those who generalized to the more marked RCs, Hamilton argues that their exceptional performance does not alter the general pattern of the implicational generalization, which is mainly unidirectional towards the unmarked implicated positions. Nevertheless, a close look at Table 1 reveals that the number of subjects (2) who generalized to the more marked relativizations in the OS-instructed group is comparable to the number of subjects who generalized to the implicated relativization types in the SS group. In the latter, only 3 subjects generalized to the equally marked relativization type (OO), and only 2 generalized to the least marked relativization type (OS). This pattern of behaviour is very much like
the one found in Doughty (1988, 1991). Table 2 presents the performance of individual learners in Doughty (1991).
Table 2. Doughty (1988, 1991) Individual subjects’ NPAH levels acquired
Learner SU < DO < OPREP < OCOMP
11 0 0 0 0
12 + 0 0 0
14 + 0 0 0
16 + 0 0 0
1 + + 0 0
19 + + + 0
4 X 0 0 0
13 X 0 0 0
15 X + 0 0
10 X + + 0
6 X + + 0
2 X + + 0
7 X + + +
20 X + + +
5 X + + +
21 X + + +
17 X X X +
8 X X X +
9 X X X +
(Adapted from Hamilton 1994 / from Doughty 1991: 451– 452, 456– 457) X = Acquired on pretest; + = newly acquired on posttest; 0 = never acquired.
As shown in Table 2, 8 subjects who showed no relative clause or only SU knowledge before the instruction began acquired OPREP, the instructed RC type, and all of these generalized to the implicated DO. Furthermore, 7 subjects, 3 of whom already showed knowledge of OPREP on the pretest, also generalized to the unimplicated OCOMP.
In summary, results from Gass (1982); Eckman, Bell and Nelson (1988);
Doughty (1991); and Hamilton (1994) indicate two main things. First, learners do benefit from RC instruction. Second, benefits derived from exposure to instruction on the marked types do frequently generalize to the unmarked RC types. However, the evidence regarding whether exposure to one marked type leads to generalization to more marked types, is confusing and incon-clusive. All the above-mentioned studies report that some subjects were able to generalize to more marked RC types. This finding was usually treated as either insignificant or exceptional, which leaves the question of directionality open to further investigation.
Hypotheses
In light of the studies that have previously demonstrated the role of instruc-tion in accelerating the rate of acquisiinstruc-tion of relative clauses, the first hypothesis of the present study is:
H1: Learners of English as a foreign language who receive instruction on one or all relativization types will do better than those who do not receive any instruction on relativization.
In accordance with studies that have indicated that benefits accruing from teaching one relativization type can be generalized to other relativization types, the second hypothesis of the study is:
H2: Instruction targeting marked relative clauses will generalize to un-marked contexts of relativization that are implicated by them.
Finally, taking into consideration previous research that has failed to con-firm of the unidirectionality of the Implicational Generalization Hypothesis, the third hypothesis is:
H3: The generalization to other relative clause types is not strictly unidi-rectional. Some subjects will generalize not only to relativization types that are less marked and implicated by the instructed relative clause type of the hierarchy, but also to relativization types that are more marked and unimplicated by it.
Research context
This study was carried out in a secondary school in Tunisia. All partici-pants were native speakers of Arabic who had received most of their edu-cation in Classical Arabic with French instruction added at age 9. Before presenting the research design, it is useful to examine the differences between relativization patterns in Arabic, French and English. It should be noted that, with regard to relative clauses, there are no differences between Classical Arabic and the variety of Arabic spoken by the students.
Differences between Arabic and English relativization systems
Keenan and Comrie (1977, 1979), Ioup and Kruse (1977), and Schachter (1974) have investigated the differences between Arabic and English with respect to the formation of relative clauses, specifically relative marker appearance, relative marker morphology, pronoun retention, and case mark-ing. Based on these contrastive studies, we may conclude that in general Arabic speakers encounter problems mainly with pronoun retention when learning English relative clauses. Only the findings related to pronoun retention will be reported in this study. The pattern of pronoun retention in Arabic, French and English languages is displayed in Table 3.
Table 3. Pronoun retention in Arabic and English
Pronoun retention SU DO IO OPREP GEN OCOMP
Arabic (classical) – + + + + +
English – – – – – –
French – – – – – n/a
(Adapted from Keenan and Comrie 1977: 93) Arabic, unlike English, retains pronouns in all relative clause types except SU. French, like English, does not retain pronouns in any type of tion. Unlike English and Arabic, French does not have OCOMP relativisa-tion. Schachter, Tyson and Diffley (1976) found that Arabic speakers who considered themselves bilingual in French were less likely to accept the grammaticality of retained pronouns than were monolingual speakers of Arabic. Examples (1) and (2) illustrate the Arabic non-retention in SU rela-tive clauses and the obligatory retention in DO relativization respecrela-tively, as well as the corresponding English and French sentences.
(1) Al-rajulu Ya’rifu al-fatata allati tanamu fi-tariki.
The man knows the girl that sleeps in the street.
The man knows the girl who sleeps in the street.
L’homme connaît la fille qui dort dans la rue.
The man knows the girl who sleeps in the street.
(2) Al-waladu ya’rifu ar-rajula allathi dharabat-hu as-sayaratu.
The boy knows the man that hit him the car.
The boy knows the man whom the car hit.
Le garçon connaît l’homme que la voiture a frappé.
The boy knows the man whom (that) the car hit.
Methodology Target of instruction
The present study targeted restrictive relativization. Restrictive relative clauses provide information that specifies which person or thing (the head noun) is referred to. Conversely, a non-restrictive relative clause provides further information that is not needed to identify the head noun referred to.
Examples (3) and (4) illustrate a restrictive relative clause and a non-restrictive one respectively.
(3) He was talking to the girl who was sitting in front of him.
(4) Nadia, who is sitting in front of John, is Tunisian.
The instructional intervention was further limited in that only the contrasting rules for pronoun retention in Arabic and English were explained and tested.
Participants
The primary criterion in selecting participants was that they had very little or no knowledge of relativization. A grammaticality judgement task to measure participants’ knowledge of relativization was administered as a pretest three days prior to the experimental instruction. To be included in the study students had to demonstrate the ability to correctly judge at least two distracters (sentences including errors not related to relative clauses).
Students who were able to correct half or more of the relativization sen-tences that they judged as incorrect were excluded as already too advanced. Only those students who correctly judged the grammaticality of fewer than half the relative clause items but could not correct them and those who could neither judge nor correct relative clauses were selected for the study.
The group of students who were eventually included in the study were 34 low-intermediate Tunisian students all studying English as a foreign
language for the second year in their secondary education. They were drawn from two classes but all had the same teacher for their regular English classes. The instruction in those classes included a range of activi-ties – both communicative and gramar-focussed lessons (see Ammar, 1996). The participants were divided into four groups, three experimental and one control group. Assigning the participants to the different groups was not random due to practical factors beyond our control.
One experimental group, referred to as DOG, was taught the DO rela-tivization. The second group, referred to as OPG, was taught OPREP. The third was exposed to SU, DO and OPREP relative clauses and is referred to as SDO. The control group, COG, was taught how to combine sentences using the conjunctions “while”, “before”, and “after”.
The first experimental group was taught the DO relative clause type to better test the directionality question. In previous studies which tested the IGH (Doughty 1991; Eckman, Bell and Nelson 1988; Gass 1982) the major exception to the unidirectionality of the IGH was found with the OCOMP relative clause type. Participants showed more success in generalizing to the OCOMP than to the GEN when taught the OPREP. Gass (1982) attributed this to a possible confusion that students might have had between preposi-tions in IO and OPREP relative clause types and the comparative “than” in OCOMP. The inclusion of a group that is not taught any relative clause type containing prepositions (DOG) may help to determine whether the confusion is the basis for generalization to the unimplicated OCOMP. It also provides more opportunities to test the directionality of generalization.
That is, contrary to some previous studies (Doughty 1991; Gass 1982) which taught the OPREP and which, consequently, could test the general-ization to more marked RCs in only two positions (GEN and OCOMP), the DOG in this study permitted two more opportunities to test the directionality of that generalization. In fact, if generalization to more marked positions is possible, the DOG participants in this study would have four chances (IO, OPREP, GEN and OCOMP) to do so.
Pretesting
The control and experimental groups were pretested using a grammaticality judgement task that was adapted from Gass (1982) and Doughty (1991) (see Appendix 1). Participants were given 4 sentences for each of the six relative clause types on the NPAH. Two of the sentences contained pronoun retention errors and the other two were correct. Examples 5 and 6 show a correct and an incorrect Direct Object relative clause sentence respectively.
(5) The book that I read yesterday is very interesting.
(6) *The test that I gave it was very difficult.
Apart from the 24 sentences that were included to test the participants’
knowledge of English relativization, the test included eight distracters that contained pluralization and subject verb agreement errors. These two grammatical structures were chosen because they occur very early in the participants’ program and tend to be reviewed frequently. Thus one would anticipate that students who were focused enough and who understood how to perform the grammaticality judgement would have high accuracy rates on these items. Sentences (7) and (8) illustrate the two types of dis-tracters.
(7) *The students is going on a journey to Monastir next Sunday.
(8) *Tunisia has many beautiful beach and hotels.
Even though the lexicon was simple, students were encouraged to ask about the meaning of any unfamiliar vocabulary item in the test. The 32 sentences were presented in an order that was intended to ensure that participants did not view several consecutive examples of the same RC type that differed only by the retained pronoun. Students were instructed to read each sentence and decide whether it was a grammatical or an ungrammatical English sen-tence. If the sentence was correct, students were asked to circle “yes”, if not they had to circle “no”. To avoid having learners focus on spelling, the participants were told that there were no spelling mistakes in the target items. Once they finished judging all the sentences, students were asked to correct the sentences they had judged as incorrect. Participants did not know that they would eventually have to do the corrections before they began. This was done to avoid the possibility that students would avoid judging sentences as incorrect in order to avoid the additional challenge of making corrections.
Posttesting
One day after the instructional intervention ended, the experimental groups and the control group were tested using two tasks: a grammaticality ment task and a sentence combination task. In the grammaticality judge-ment task, participants were required to judge 48 sentences (8 sentences for each of the 6 RC types). Four sentences of each type were correct and