The Gift of the Gap: A Study of Dutch and Swedish Learners' Use of the English Zero Relativizer.

The article focuses on the possibility of omitting relativizer in certain syntactic situations. It looks at the use of English zero relativizer that occurs in identical rules in most languages of North Germanic origin such as Swedish or the Romance language or Germanic. It explores the hypothesis that zero relativizer is frequently used in English texts that are produced by Dutch learners than in texts from Swedish learners. Parts of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) were used for the research in which English argumentative texts produced by Dutch and Swedish learners were examined for relative constructions and shows that the hypothesis was wrong. It also notes that zero construction in English is less formal than those with an explicit relative marker.