The role of non-syntactic factors in the production and processing of English relative clauses by Korean EFL learners: A L2 corpus-based approach

There have been a growingnumber of corpus studies exploring the role of linguistic experience or input in sentenceprocessing. Previous studies have used frequencies in first language (L1) corpora torepresent the input of second language (L2) learners, but it has been claimed that L2output as well as L1 output contribute to L2 acquisition and processing (Ellis 2002;Ellis and Collins 2009; Ellis and Wulff 2020). By analyzing an L2 corpus produced byKorean adult learners of English, this paper aims to establish more accurate input forL2 learners and investigate why Korean adult learners of English are sensitive to nounanimacy and topicality in processing English relative clauses, as native speakers ofEnglish are. The results of the L2 corpus analysis reveal that object and subject relativeclauses display different distributional patterns with respect to head noun animacy,embedded noun animacy, and the topicality of the embedded NP due to their strongtendency to have unmarked subjects and objects in terms of animacy and topicality. This paper proposes that the experience of subjecthood and objecthood, which arecrosslinguistically associated with noun animacy and topicality, plays a role in producingand processing relative clauses in L2 which is syntactically different from the nativelanguage of L2 speakers. In addition, I discuss that some processing differences betweenL1 and L2 can arise due to L2 learners’ experience with their native language.