This linear difference has resulted in different predictions as to the comparative difficulty in the processing of a Chinese subject-extracted relative clause and an object-extracted relative clause.

One frequently cited piece of evidence is the fact that an object-extracted relative clause is generally more difficult to process than a subject-extracted relative clause in English and many other head-initial languages.

This paper mainly presents a literature review of the two approaches to the syntax of Chinese relative clauses in the last ten years: the movement approach and the no-movement approach.

The articles concerned about them in the previousstudies are not less than one hundred, mainly covering the structural, semantic andeven pragmatic specialties of them and a thorough discussion has been done centeringon the properties and applications of Chinese topic sentences.