CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Motivation 1.2 Significance of the Study 1.3 Outline of the Book CHAPTER 2 TYPOLOGICAL UNIVERSALS, MARKEDNESS AND RELATIVE CLAUSES 2.1 Interlanguage Theory 2.2 Linguistic Universals and Second Language Acquisition 2.2.1 Typological universals and Universal Grammar 2.2.2 Typological universals and second language acquisition 2.3 Typological Markedness and English Relative Clauses 2.3.1 Typological markedness 2.3.2 Relative clause 2.3.3 Accessibility Hierarchy and English relative clauses CHAPTER 3 RELATIVE CLAUSE ACQUISITION AND PROCESSING 3.1 Research on Accessibility and Relative Clauses 3.1.1 Research on avoidance of English relative clauses 3.1.2 Research on learning difficulties of English relative clauses 3.2 Research on Accessibility, Embeddedness and Relative Clauses 3.3 Research on Accessibility, Animacy and Relative Clauses 3.4 Interim Summary and Evaluation CHAPTER 4 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 4.1 Objectives and Research Questions 4.2 General Research Design 4.3 Corpus-based Study 4.3.1 Introduction to corpora 4.3.2 Data retrieval 4.3.3 Data coding 4.4 Experimental Studies 4.4.1 Participants 4.4.2 Instrumentation 4.4.3 Data collection and treatment CHAPTER 5 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 5.1 Corpus-based Study 5.1.1 Accessibility 5.1.2 Accessibility and embeddedness 5.1.3 Accessibility and animacy 5.1.4 Interim summary 5.2 Experimental Studies 5.2.1 Experiment 1 : accessibility 5.2.2 Experiment 2 : accessibility and embeddedness 5.2.3 Experiment 3 : accessibility and animacy 5.2.4 Interim summary CHAPTER 6 GENERAL DISCUSSION 6.1 The Role of Accessibility 6.1.1 Filler-gap domain 6.1.2 Word order 6.1.3 Perspective shift 6.1.4 Conjoined-clause analysis 6.1.5 Other accounts 6.1.6 Interim summary 6.2 Accessibility and Embeddedness 6.2.1 The role of embeddedness 6.2.2 The relationship between accessibility and embeddedness 6.3 Accessibility and Animacy 6.3.1 The role of animacy 6.3.2 The relationship between accessibility and animacy 6.4 Typological Studies and SLA Research 6.4.1 The correspondence between typology and SLA 6.4.2 The contribution from SLA to typology CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSION AND OUTLOOK 7.1 Summary 7.2 Implications 7.2.1 Theoretical implications 7.2.2 Pedagogical implications 7.3 Limitations and Extensions APPENDICES Appendix I Experiment 1 Exl.1 Sentence completion test Exl.2 Sentence combination test Exl.3 Sentence combination test Appendix II Experiment 2 Ex2 Sentence combination test Appendix III Experiment 3 Ex3.1 Sentence completion test Ex3.2 Sentence combination test Appendix IV Examples of untagged corpus data and coding Appendix V Examples of tagged corpus data and coding REFERENCES INDEX