A Study of 'that' Omission in the English Relative Clause

Abstract

There is a conflict at the phonetic interface with respect to ‘computational efficiency’and ‘ease of processing’ (Chomsky 2006). Erasure can help minimize the computation, but brings about complicated ‘filler-gap’ problems. Connectivity effects show the preference of computational efficiency to ease of communication, satisfying the semantic interface (Park 2005). The optional use of ‘that’ in the English relative clause also shows such preference of computational efficiency in production to ease of processing in comprehension(Race et al. 2003). But their research on ‘that’ omission has been focusing at finding the internal factors within the relative clause which increase the burden in production process, and at investigating the reaction of comprehenders to the appearance/absence of ‘that.’ In line with the perspective of Race et al. (2003), I carried out further investigations to explore the possibility of existence of another party which is, in this paper, an external factor (antecedent) corresponding to the factors within the scope of relative clause itself. More specifically, I examined the relationship between so-called ‘objectrelative pronoun’ omission and antecedent in the English relative clause by corpus and RT analyses to see whether or not the presence/absence of object relative pronoun‘that’ affects the interplay between production and comprehension. The analyses of reading time (RT) and corpus are frequently used in various related fields (especially language production and comprehension research) over many years. Whereas, according to the RT analysis of this paper, comprehenders are accordingly sensitive to the distributional properties of “that” in language production and the inclusion of “that” is helpful to comprehenders but only in environments that parallel its use in language production, the corpus analysis in this paper shows that the specificity of antecedent modulates the appearance/absence of ‘that’ in the object relative clause.