ABSTRACT
This chapter builds on the foundational insight that normative grammar fails to capture the major facts of actual usage by conducting an analysis of variation in restrictive relative clauses in spontaneous child language. In order to contextualize the investigation, it summarizes prior work on children's acquisition of relative clauses. A cursory review of the literature on children's acquisition of relative clauses reveals a paucity of usage-based studies of these constructions. The chapter describes the kinds of naturally occurring data and methodological procedures that can be exploited to investigate children's use of these constructions. The Ottawa English Corpus (OEC), which serves as a community baseline, was constructed from sociolinguistic interviews with adults. As the nature of relative clause variation is reported to involve dialect-specific patterns it is important that the adult benchmark is based on comparable vernacular data from the same community.
