We present the ICLE-RC, a corpus of learner English texts annotated for relative clauses and related phenomena. The corpus contains a collection of 144 academic essays from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE; Granger et al., 2002), representing six L1 backgrounds – Finnish, Italian, Polish, Swedish, Turkish, and Urdu. These texts are annotated for over 900 relative clauses, with respect to a wide array of lexical, syntactic, semantic, and discourse features. The corpus also provides annotation of over 400 related phenomena (it-clefts, pseudo-clefts, existential-relatives, etc.). Here, we describe the corpus annotation framework, report on the IAA study, discuss the prospects of (semi-)automating annotation, and present the first results from our corpus analysis. We envisage the ICLE-RC to be used as a valuable resource for research on relative clauses in SLA, language typology, World Englishes, and discourse analysis.

We investigate the referents of relative markers of English relative clauses, focusing on their syntactic role in the matrix clauses. The referents, unlike relative markers and related features, have compratively remained understudied. We examine the syntactic environments of the referents as part of a larger project, which develops the ICLE-RC, a corpus of learner English texts annotated for relative clauses and related phenomena (it-/pseudo-clefts, existential-relatives, etc.). The corpus derives from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE; Granger et al., 2020), and contains 144 academic essays, representing six L1 backgrounds – Finnish, Italian, Polish, Swedish, Turkish, and Urdu. We annotate those texts for over 900 relative clauses (and over 400 related phenomena), with respect to a wide array of lexical, syntactic, semantic, and discourse features. Results from our analysis show that the relativisation of referents varies according to their syntactic functions. The referents are also observed to interact with other RC-features, yielding systematic variations across different L1 backgrounds, (some of) which can potentially be attributed to the typological properties of the associated L1.