A Discourse Explanation of the Grammar of Relative Clauses in English Conversation

Abstract

In the process of communicating, conversationalists constantly make decisions about their interlocutors' state of knowledge, and on the basis of these decisions make lexical, grammatical, and intonational choices about how to manage the 'flow' of information. This paper focuses on how such decision-making affects choices in relative clause constructions in American English conversations. On the basis of a quantitative analysis of a corpus of natural conversations, we show that the structural choices in relative clause constructions are best explained as symptoms of interactants' attention to information flow.*