Accessibility hierarchy and acquisition of English relative clauses by Urdu EFL learners

Abstract

This study aims to examine the errors committed by Urdu EFL learners in acquiring English Relative Clauses (henceforth RCs) by putting to test the predictions of hypothesis proposed by Keenan and Comrie’s (1977) Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH). It aims to inspect whether the NPAH constraint for the acquisition of English relative clauses be applicable to Urdu L2 learners or not. In order to accomplish the purpose of the study total 80 participants were selected from the University of Azad Jammu & Kashmir. Data were collected through questionnaire that was consisted of two tasks: grammaticality judgment task and sentence combining task. The study uncovered the fact that Urdu learners commit a number of errors in the production of English RCs. These errors are pronoun retention, head noun retention, shift of noun function, non-adjacency to head noun and relative pronoun, preposition stranding, and deletion, selection of wrong relativizer, change of lexical item, change of syntactic pattern, and deletion of comparative particle. Urdu EFL learners’ hierarchy of acquiring English RCs is partially consistent with NPAH. The present study confirms the difficulty of direct objective relative clauses compared to subject relative clauses and indirect relatives in Pahari, which strongly supports Comrie (2007) hierarchy that shows that the performance of Urdu EFL Learners for first three positions of hierarchy is consistent with NPAH while their performance for the remaining three positions is not consistent with NPAH. Urdu learners find it easy to perform on OCOMP RCs which is placed at the end in NPAH. Urdu EFL learners find Oblique RCs more difficult compared to genitive RCs.

Keywords

• relative clauses
• noun phrase accessibility hierarchy
• Urdu EFL learners