Unraveling the logical status of sentential relative clauses in English: Constructing a multifunctional framework

Sentential relative clauses (hereafter SRCs) resemble comment adverbial clauses and can be paraphrased as and-coordinate equivalents. This study unravels the logical status of SRCs in English from a multifunctional perspective under the framework of systemic functional linguistics, with a view to revealing their distinguishing features in tactic (traditionally grammatical) and logico-semantic (traditionally semantic) relations. A review of relevant literature reveals that as researchers have been using varied formal criteria in examining their logical status, there is great controversy over whether SRCs are hypotactic elaborating clauses or paratactic extending clauses. Therefore, a multifunctional framework is constructed to ascertain the defining criteria: the taxis of an SRC is dependent on its status of speech function in discourse, and the logico-semantic relations on its experiential semantics in a wider discourse context. With extensive attested examples analyzed, we conclude that tactically, textual SRCs stand in a paratactic relation to their initiating clauses, while experiential SRCs stand in a hypotactic relation to their dominant clauses, and that logico-semantically, textual SRCs tend to enhance their initiating clauses along the textual line, while experiential SRCs expand their dominant clauses by elaboration, extension and enhancement along both the textual and experiential lines.