This paper reports the findings of a study of the acquisition of relative clauses in Chinese, Japanese, Persian, German, and Portuguese by first and second year students of these languages with English as their first language. Various structures were tested with the aim of separating the features of interlanguage which may be attributed to first language interference from those which may be explained as being universal to second language acquisition. Among these structures were use of resumptive pronouns in the relative clause, deletion of relativizers, stranding of prepositions, deletion of prepositions, and piedpiping structures. In line with the work of Gass and Ard (1980) and Hyltenstam (1981), the present paper examines the explanatory value of the accessibility hierarchy of Keenan and Comrie (1977) as applied to the ease or difficulty of the acquisition of relativization of various syntactic types, and expands this study by including data from the acquisition of relative clause types not examined in previous works. Also tested were structures involving different strategies for the parsing and recognition of relative clauses, in order to determine which are employed most frequently and most successfully by second language learners, and structures with correct and incorrect deletion of prepositions, in order to see whether the loss of information involved would be a constraining factor.

Propriedades Paramétricas e Probabilidades"Somente aquele lingüista que, ao menos uma vez, sai da atmosfera esfumaçada de hipóteses de seu gabinete (...) e adentra o ar puro da realidade tangível (...) a fim de colher informações sobre aqueles fatos que teorias cinzentas jamais lhe podem revelar, e somente aquele que para sempre renuncia àquele método de investigação antigamente difundido e ainda muito usado segundo o qual as pessoas observam a linguagem somente no papel e tudo resolvem através de terminologia, sistemas de regras e formalismo gramatical e acreditam, assim, terem desvendado a essência dos fenômenos ao terem alinhado um nome para a coisa -somente ele poderá chegar a uma idéia correta sobre o modo como as formas lingüísticas vivem e mudam, e somente ele pode adquirir aqueles princípios metodológicos sem os quais nenhum resultado confiável pode jamais ser obtido em investigações sobre a linguagem (...)". 1 * Este artigo foi publicado inicialmente em: TARALLO, Fernando; KATO, Mary. A. "Harmonia trans-sistêmica: variação intra-e inter-lingüística". Preedição 5. Campinas, SP: Unicamp, 1989. Agradecemos novamente ao editor da coleção Preedição, Eduardo Guimarães, e aos autores, em nome de Mary Kato, por terem autorizado a reimpressão do artigo publicado. 1 "Therefore: only that comparative linguist who for once emerges from the hypotheses-beclouded atmosphere of the workshop in which the original Indo-European forms are forced, and steps into the clear air of tangible reality and of the present in order to get information about those things which gray theory can never reveal to him, and only he who renounces forever that formerly widespread but still used method of investigation according to which people

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