A RESEARCH INTO RELATIVE CLAUSES IN ENGINEERING TEXTS

<p>As relative clauses may pose challenges to non-native speakers of English due to their<br />various forms and functions, the paper investigates the differences and similarities in the use of<br />relative clauses in the engineering texts between English and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (B/C/S).<br />The contrastive analysis of texts in the target languages was done on a corpus compiled from<br />two issues of the bilingual journal of mechanical engineering - Mašinstvo. The frequency counts<br />of relative clause were identified and the clauses were classified based on their restrictiveness,<br />relativizers, and, in the English subcorpus, their form. The findings indicate that restrictive<br />clauses dominate both subcorpora, while the choice of relativizers remains similar. However,<br />translation reveals interesting differences such as the use of reduced relative clauses in English<br />to represent various B/C/S expressions. Thus, the research yields pedagogically significant<br />insights for ESP instruction, given the limited contrastive analysis of relative clauses in the field.</p>