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In English, a relative clause (RC) postposes the head noun phrase (NP). By contrast, relative clauses in Chinese are located to the left of the head nouns due to the lack of relative pronouns. Instead, it is connected by “DE” as the signaling word. The RC of Chinese can either immediately prepose its NP, or be separated from its head by a determiner phrase (DP). The DP studied in this paper include the structures of the "demonstrative + quantifier", "numeral + quantifier", and “demonstrative + quantifier + classifier ”etc., such as “zhè gè (this)", "jǐ zhāng(several)", “zhè jǐ gè(these)” etc. which can be used as the modifiers of the head nouns, indicating the referent and the quantity, such as "zhè fēng xìn(this letter), zhè běn shū (this book)" and so on.
This word order variation results in two types of constructions: the OMN with the RC + DP + NP order (e.g., [ gāng lái de]RC [zhè gè] DP xué shēng, ‘a student (that) just arrived’) and the IMN with the DP + RC + NPs order (e.g., [zhè gè] DP [gāng lái de]RC xué shēng, ‘a student (that) just arrived’). For CFL (Chinese as a foreign language) learners, this construction variation is not easy to acquire and is decided by many factors. In this paper, we conduct a multifactorial study to explore the conditioning factors of the variation of these two constructions in Chinese interlanguage data taken from the International Chinese Interlanguage Corpus. Binary logistic regression, conditional inference trees and random forests are used for analysis. Language Transfer theory serves as part of theoretical framework in this paper. Odlin (1989) proposes that language transfer can be positive or negative according to its influence to the process of language acquisition. Positive transfer indicates preexisted language system plays a positive role in foreign language acquisition. In this way, SLA learners can benefit from their mother tongue (L1), which will lower the learning difficulty and accelerate the learning process. Negative transfer means L1 plays a negative role in the process of language acquisition. In this case, SLA learners may wrongly apply the rules and experience from L1, leading to a bad performance. It will impede the learning process and produce errors.
The factors related to the order alternation of RC and DP can be divided into the linguistics field and the linguistics-external field. The linguistics field is mainly associated with morphosyntactic factors consisting of animacy of head NPs, length of head NPs, grammatical roles of head NPs in matrix clause, grammatical roles of head NPs in RCs, transitivity of predicate in RCs, length of RCs, types of DP. The linguisticsexternal field concerns producer-related factors, such as learners’ mother tongue. Examinations of these two constructions show significant effects of the factors in a descending order of the effect size: length of clause, grammatical roles of head NPs in main clauses, grammatical roles of head NPs in RCs, transitivity of predicate in RCs, and length of head NPs.