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Abstract Abstract: This study addresses the choice of relativizer omission by both Chinese EFL learners and native speakers of English. It reveals that, through a corpus-based collexeme analysis, 1) relativizer omission is not a random choice but lexically constrained by its head and RC subject; 2) relativizer omission should be classified as a pair of synonymous syntactic constructions; 3) a similar cognitive processing mechanism could be identified between the two groups, with Chinese EFL learners displaying a more significant correlation between the cognitive load and relativizer omission. Different from the bottom-up exemplar-based probabilistic generalization approach in L1 acquisition, probabilistic generalization approach and abstract grammatical rules have been respectively applied, by Chinese EFL learners, to relative clauses with low/high cognitive load. The similarity and discrepancy between the two groups correlate with their different sensitivity to the cognitive load of relativizer omission. Chinese EFL learners’ conservative strategy in regard to relativizer omission originates from the lack of natural language input.
Key Words: collexeme analysis; construction; relativizer omission; head; RC subject
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