Syntax of referents of relative markers: Evidence from a corpus of learner E nglish (2025)

Abstract: We investigate the referents of relative markers of English relative clauses, focusing on their syntactic role in the matrix clauses. The referents, unlike relative markers and related features, have compratively remained understudied. We examine the syntactic environments of the referents as part of a larger project, which develops the ICLE-RC, a corpus of learner English texts annotated for relative clauses and related phenomena (it-/pseudo-clefts, existential-relatives, etc.). The corpus derives from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE; Granger et al., 2020), and contains 144 academic essays, representing six L1 backgrounds – Finnish, Italian, Polish, Swedish, Turkish, and Urdu. We annotate those texts for over 900 relative clauses (and over 400 related phenomena), with respect to a wide array of lexical, syntactic, semantic, and discourse features. Results from our analysis show that the relativisation of referents varies according to their syntactic functions. The referents are also observed to interact with other RC-features, yielding systematic variations across different L1 backgrounds, (some of) which can potentially be attributed to the typological properties of the associated L1.

## introduction relative clauses (henceforth rcs) are a type of subordinate clauses that typically modify nouns or noun phrases, and sometimes also adjectives foot_0 , adverbs foot_1 , pps foot_2 , vps foot_3 , and even entire clauses @xcite . rcs constitute a rich body of research, addressing themes such as syntactic and typological variation (comrie, 1998; grosu, 2012), semantic features (cornish, 2018), discourse functions (brandt et al., 2009), fla/sla (diessel and tomasello, 2005; doughty, 1991), parsing (goad et al., 2021), processing (reali and christiansen, 2007), historical usage (suárez-gómez, 2006), diachronic development (leech et al., 2009; fajri and okwar, 2020), corpus-based analysis (biber et al., 1999; weichmann, 2015), and world englishes (suárez-gómez, 2015). despite the depth and breadth of previous research, the scope of these studies have largely remained confined to the analysis of rcs alone and associated features found therein. we strive to extend the scope of rc analysis, by examining the larger syntactic environment in which rcs occur. in particular, we investigate the referents of relative markers of english rcs, focusing on their syntactic role in their respective matrix clauses. we examine rc-referents as part of a larger project, the icle-rc, which builds a corpus of learner english annotated for rcs and related phenomena (it-/pseudo-clefts, existentialrelatives, etc.). the corpus builds on a subset of the international corpus of learner english (icle; granger et al., 2020), and contains 144 academic essays, representing six l1 backgrounds -finnish, italian, polish, swedish, turkish, and urdu. in this paper, we present our multi-layered, feature-rich annotation framework for rc(-referent) analysis, and report on our corpus analysis of rc-referents and their interaction with other rc-features. this paper is structured as follows: we outline the previous work on rc-referents in section 2. section 3 introduces our large-scale corpus project, and describes the annotation schemes. we present the general results and those for referent functions in section 4 and section 5, respectively. section 6 discusses the findings, and section 7 concludes the paper, outlining some future research directions. ## previous work one of the most influential work on rcs (and rc-referents) is offered by keenan and comrie's (1977) np accessibility hierarchy (npah): besides npah, there exist some studies that considered rc-referents an important rc-feature. for example, fox and thompson (1990) investigated the syntactic and discourse properties of the head nps in the matrix clause and their interaction with rcs in conversations. they observed that the structuring of rcs is crucially shaped by the formulation of the referents according to many interactive and cognitive factors of the communicative situations. tagliamonte et al. (2005) examined relative markers in vernacular varieties of british english, and observed the prevalence of that and zero marker, instead of wh-forms. the authors identified the type of the referent (e.g., definite or indefinite nps) as one of the determining factors behind the marker preference. more particularly, indefinite referents (along with sentence structure) entailed the use of the zero-variant in rcs. hinrichs et al. (2015) investigated the changing trends in the use of restrictive relativisers, examining the shift from which to that in written standard english. the authors conducted a multivariate analysis on a large collection of rcs (16k+) from the brown corpus 7 , and used a number of independent variables which included, among other features, a set of referent-features, such as the pos, number, length, and definiteness of the referent. the study concluded that the shift (@xmath0. @xcite nevertheless, counter-evidence to npah (e.g., the uniformity of the subject-object asymmetry) has been provided by some later studies. for an overview, see kidd (2011). ## the icle-rc project we have developed the icle-rc to investigate rcs and related phenomena (it-/pseudo-clefts, existential-relatives, etc.) in learner english. the corpus builds on a subset of the international corpus of learner english (icle; granger et al., 2020). the icle is a corpus of academic essays written by undergraduate students from a set list of topics 8 . these students are intermediate or advanced learners of english, coming from different l1 backgrounds. the first version of the icle-rc contains 144 icle texts (100k+ words), covering six l1 backgrounds -finnish, italian, polish, swedish, turkish, and urdu -with 24 texts from each 9 . these texts are annotated for 924 rcs, with respect to a wide array of lexical, syntactic, semantic, and discourse features. these texts are also annotated for 407 related phenomena, which we call other constructions (henceforth ocs) @xcite . the icle-rc is designed to serve a number of purposes. first, the corpus provides real language data to assess english learners' use of rcs against the standard rules of english grammars (e.g., the use of which for a human referent, or the use of a comma for integrated rcs). second, the icle-rc covers six l1 backgrounds representing six different language families (pereltsvaig, 2023) -finnish: uralic; italian: romance; polish: slavic; swedish: germanic; turkish: turkic; and urdu: indo-aryan 11 . this would allow identifying typological patterns for certain rc features as well as highlighting those which potentially result from cross-linguistic influence (e.g., the use of extraposed rcs). this would also offer significant implications for research in world englishes, in comparison to native varieties of english (e.g., by comparing the icle-rc with comparable corpora such as icnale (ishikawa, 2023) as well @xcite some of the icle essay topics are as follows: (1) the prison system is outdated., (2) no civilised society should punish its criminals: it should rehabilitate them., (3) feminists have done more harm to the cause of women than good. for specimen essays, check out the icle500 dataset. @xcite the detailed distribution of the essays in the icle-rc is provided in as those of native academic english such as loc-ness (granger, 1998)). finally, the corpus would help us explore english learners' use of ocs as alternative strategies of information structuring, in addition to rcs. ## general results the purpose of developing the icle-rc is to offer gold-standard data, and hence, the corpus is entirely created from human annotation. the rcs and ocs in the icle-rc were annotated by two annotators (the authors), who have many years of experience with various kinds of linguistic annotation. the annotation was performed using the uam corpus-tool (version 2.8.16) (o 'donnell, 2008), and is saved in a stand-off xml format. @xcite the reliability of the annotation was tested through an iaa study. the two annotators independently annotated all 24 texts for the polish part of the corpus. given our multi-layered, feature-rich annotation scheme ( ## results for referent functions we begin with presenting the distribution of referent functions in the corpus, as shown in next, we examine the co-occurrence of referent functions and other rc features. first, second, finally, the co-occurrence of referent functions and restrictiveness in ## discussion in the icle-rc, the students (advanced l2 learners of english) were found to relativise all major constituents in the matrix clause in the rcs, but with varying degrees: direct @xmath1. this order is, however, not corroborated by npah (keenan and com- the same reasoning apparently fails to apply to turkish, however. turkish does not employ an overt wh-element or complementiser to introduce rcs; rather, rcs are marked morphologically by certain particles (suffixes), as shown in (27), taken from kornfilt (1997, p.29). 25 (27) [geçen last yaz summer ada-da island-loc. ben-i i.acc. gör-en] see.part. kişi-ler person.pl. next, the distribution of the marker functions (in for referent types, fox and thompson (1990) found that non-human subject heads in the matrix clause tend to co-occur with the objects in the rcs, and also that non-human object heads in the matrix clause do not tend to co-occur with the objects in the rc @xcite . this is partially corroborated by our data, as we found evidence only for the second claim, but counter-evidence for the first one. the distribution of the relevant categories is provided in finally, the prevalence of integrated rcs in the icle-rc indicates that the rcs are used more often as an integral part of the referent np rather than providing additional information or commentary about it. this implies that l2 english learners use rcs more as a syntactic device than a discourse one (i.e., rcs as discourse segments). ## conclusions and outlook rc-referents in the icle-rc show variation for their syntactic functions across different l1 backgrounds. the variation seems even greater and multifarious when their co-occurrence with other rc-features is taken into account. in our future work, we would conduct a thorough examination of the rc-related grammar of each l1, and test our findings against them to see whether any crosslinguistic factors influence the patterning of referent functions in the english rcs. the icle-rc is now in the post-production stage, and will soon be published as an open-access resource. our future work would include expanding the size and coverage of the corpus by adding more texts for the existing six l1s as well as incorporating texts from other l1 backgrounds (from the icle), representing new (sub-)language families; e.g., cantonese (sino-tibetan), dutch (west germanic), greek (hellenic), japanese (japonic), farsi (indo-iranian), russian (slavic), tswana (bantu). this would facilitate large-scale studies on referent functions and many other rc-related phenomena.