relative clause and attributive clause

[tooironic]

I hope this is the right forum for this.

My question is about relative clauses (关系从句/关系字句) in English. Whenever I've asked Chinese people about them they don't understand what I'm talking about until I explain they're when you use "which", "that", "who", etc. to describe a noun. They then usually reply that they know these as 定语从句. But is 定语从句 the same thing? Apparently this is translated as "attributive clause" but I've never heard of such a thing, though I get the general meaning of it when I read the term.

[SuEn]

I always assumed them to be the same and used them interchangeably. However, the book I'm reading right now, A generative Grammar of Mandarin Chinese, talks about two types of 定语从句 (and claims that is how they are traditionally referred to): 同位语句 and 关系语句. These two have different syntactic structures. So that might be something to consider.

[jkduck]

I also feel confused. I am studying English, and in our grammar book 关系从句 includes 定语从句, but it does not tell the difference.(the name of our grammar book is 新编英语语法教程 a new english grammar coursebook)

[jasmy4]

I am a Chinese who has been teaching high school English in China . They are exactly the same thing. We include 同位语从句 into noun clause.

[陳德聰]

I believe 关系从句 is a direct translation from the English (or another Indo-European language's) linguistic terminology for a concept that doesn't really exist in Mandarin, which is probably why most Chinese people would have no idea what it is.

定语从句 is the term I think most Chinese people would be most familiar with, but perhaps only through their English studies. From what I can tell, Chinese linguists sometimes use 定语从句 and 关系从句 to talk about the same thing, but that is not surprising seeing as different English linguists do it too.

If you translate 定语从句 as "attributive clause", the reason that may be a bit weird sounding is because an "attributive" is anything that modifies a head noun. Verbs, adjectives, and nouns can all be attributives. I hesitate to say it because I haven't been reading a lot of syntax typology stuff for a while, but I feel like most English speakers would comfortably recognize clauses that modify head nouns as "relative clauses".

A 同位语 on the other hand, is an appositive, which as far as I know is not a type of relative clause... But I may be wrong about that. I suppose it gets confusing since "I heard the news that our team lost" has a "that" in it which usually signals "relative clause", but in this case actually is part of an appositive phrase.

Basically, 关系从句 and 定语从句 are different names for the same thing, based on different interpretations of linguistic theory. I would not translate 定语从句 as "attributive clause", because that is not really a commonly accepted term in the linguistic field and reads as a "made-up word" to me. For all intents and purposes, 定语从句 means relative clause, but in terms of theory supposedly presents some problems.