Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Lingüística mención Lengua Inglesa / No autorizada su publicación a texto completo, según petición de su autor / To date, most of the existing standard grammatical descriptions of the English language have used
decontextualised written sentence tokens as their primary source of data. However, these standard
grammatical descriptions have overlooked the complexities of the constructions and patterns which
can be normally found in oral interactions. The present research study aims to determine the
defining structural properties and discourse-pragmatic functions of adnominal and sentential
English relative clauses in spontaneous oral narratives produced by adult native speakers of British
English. For this purpose, 110 relative clauses which were gathered from 4 interviews collected
from an online British database of real life personal narratives of health and illness experiences were
analysed. Results show that some instances of adnominal relative clauses and sentential relative
clauses differ structurally from relative clauses commonly found in written English for such factors
as the proximity between the antecedent and the relative clause, on the one hand, and the role of
ellipsis in spoken interactions, on the other hand. It was also found that relative clauses in spoken
interactions can be considered supra-sentential units which serve six different discourse pragmatic
functions: narrative, evaluative, argumentative, reporting, descriptive and informative.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UCHILE/oai:repositorio.uchile.cl:2250/117102 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Álvarez Escobar, Carlos |
| Contributors | Muñoz Acevedo, Daniel, Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades, Escuela de Postgrado, Departamento de Lingüística |
| Publisher | Universidad de Chile |
| Source Sets | Universidad de Chile |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Tesis |
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