On structural complexity of written English. Relating more through relative clauses
On structural complexity of written English. Relating more through relative clauses

Summary/Abstract: The present research paper describes the use of relative clauses in spoken and written English. The focus is placed on the frequency of incidence of relative clauses and their particular functional types. Quantitative analysis was performed to determine the frequency of incidence of relative clauses in the selected registers of spoken and written English. Comparative analysis was applied to determine differences between spoken and written English in the use of relative clauses. The present study also applied the principles of corpus linguistics by performing the analysis on a small-size corpus of authentic samples of language. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate the correlation between the incidence of relative clauses and the structural complexity of the discourse. The results of the study point to greater structural complexity of the written discourse by considering the characteristics of non-restrictive relative clauses. The paper provides an alternative view upon the structural complexity of discourse by determining the complexity using a non-conventional index, namely the incidence of a particular type of subordinate clause.

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