Relativisation and Accessibility: A Corpus Analysis of Relative Clauses in Arabic Written Texts

Keenan and Comrie (1977) posited that the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH) is a universal hierarchy determining the use of relative clauses in written and spoken communication. The NPAH states that the accessibility to relativisation follows the order, from the most to the least accessible: Subject (SU)> Direct Object (DO)> Indirect Object (IO)> Oblique (OBL)> Genitive (GEN)> Object of Comparison (OCOMP). Keenan (1975) suggested that the distribution of relative clauses in corpora reflects their accessibility, as predicted by the NPAH, with SU being the most accessible grammatical position to relativisation. Discourse functions of relative clauses, such as characterisation and anchoring, have also been argued to determine accessibility. Accordingly, Fox (1987) proposed the Absolutive Hypothesis (AH), which states that intransitive subject (ISU) relative clauses and (DO) relative clauses are more accessible than transitive subject (TSU) relative clauses. Other factors can influence the frequency of relative clauses in corpora, including genre (Jensen, 1999), spoken vs. written language (Gordon & Hendrick, 2005) and time period (Hogbin & Song, 2007). This thesis simultaneously considers the role of multiple factors on the frequency of relative clauses in Arabic texts. Considered factors can be categorised into two types: (1) construction-external factors, which include language variety (dialect) and genre, and (2) construction-internal factors, which include characteristics of the head such as definiteness, grammatical position in the main clause and animacy. Among these factors, variety is of particular importance. One standard variety may not be enough to represent a language (Fleischer, 2004). Arabic countries commonly exhibit diglossia, where there are different varieties used (Ferguson, 1959). This study deals with relativisation in three varieties: Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic and Iraqi Arabic. Thus, this study is one of the first to test a universal hierarchy on a dialectical basis. In this study, relative clauses are classified into seven grammatical positions—TSU, ISU, DO, IO, OBL, GEN, OCOMP— and analysed statistically using multi-level Poisson regression analysis (Baayen, 2008; Keune, Ernestus, Van Hout, & Baayen, 2005). The results show that absolutive relative clauses (ISU+ DO) are the most frequent relative clauses used in Arabic texts, and this result shows a consistency among the three varieties and the two genres (fiction and non-fiction). Moreover, IO relative clauses are not found to be as frequent as predicted by the NPAH. The full order of relative clauses used in Arabic written texts is ABS> TSU, OBL> GEN> OTHERS, where OTHERS includes IO and OCOMP due to their small percentages. This order is found in Modern Standard Arabic and Iraqi Arabic, but not in Classical Arabic, where OBL is greater than TSU, and it is found in nonfiction but not in fiction where the TSU is greater than OBL. Furthermore, it is found that animacy of the heads of relative clauses plays a significant role in determining the distribution of relative clauses in the texts. Animacy determines whether the NPAH or the AH is manifested in the distribution of relative clauses in a text. The effect of animacy is not restricted to the upper grammatical positions, but also the lower positions, where the GEN position appears consistently higher than the OBL position when the heads of relative clauses refer to animate referents. Thus, accessibility to relativisation does not always follow a single universal hierarchy. This thesis also investigates the use of relativisation strategies (the pronoun retention strategy and the gap strategy) in Arabic relative clauses. This study aims to find the basis on which these two relativisation strategies are used in light of the NPAH and other theories. The results show that the resumptive pronoun is mainly used to avoid ambiguous sentences and grammatical violations, in particular the preposition stranding rule. Moreover, there are several factors that determine the use of the resumptive pronoun over the gap including definiteness, the distance between the head and the relativised noun phrase, and the obligatoriness of the relativised noun phrase