Title: Scientometric Analysis of China’s Relative Clause Studies

Abstract: This paper takes the core literature themed on “relative clause” in CNKI (1990-2017) as the object of bibliometric analysis. By employing the scientific measurement software known as CiteSpace, it conducts a series of visualized analysis on the selected literature, including “annual dispatch quantity analysis”, “the gathering analysis of the key words’ co-occurrence”, “co-citation of literature”, “literature co-cited cluster analysis” and “the common citation analysis of the authors’ literature”. It has been found that the research hot spots of relative clauses at home include “second language acquisition”, “syntactic representation”, “relational markers” and “typology”, and that the research frontier concentrates on such topics as “cognitive processing mechanism”, “second language acquisition” and “second language learners.”

Keywords: relative clause, research path, knowledge map

Authors: Xiaoyang Shen, Lecturer, College of Foreign Languages, Xiangtan University, Xiangtan, Hunan, China; Yunhua Deng, Professor, College of Foreign Studies, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, Hunan, China.