Relativizers Used by Russian Learners of English: A Corpus Study

Student: Milyaeva Nadezhda

Supervisor: Olga Ilyinichna Vinogradova

Educational Programme: Fundamental and Computational Linguistics (Bachelor)

Year of Graduation: 2020

The phenomenon of interference between source language and target language is very important for the second language inquisition studies. In this research we will find out how the native language of Russian students learning English affects their way of constructing sentences with relative clauses and choosing relativizers in them. Observing some other studies and the corpuses of English texts we will see the rules of the relativizers distribution and how native speakers follow them. Using the corpus with essays written by Russian students in English we will get some needed data about their mistakes and differences from the constructions of the natives. Due to that comparison we can make some assumptions about system characteristics that affect the process of creating constructions with relative clauses both for natives and learners.

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