As relative clauses may pose challenges to non-native speakers of English due to their various forms and functions, the paper investigates the differences and similarities in the use of relative clauses in the engineering texts between English and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (B/C/S). The contrastive analysis of texts in the target languages was done on a corpus compiled from two issues of the bilingual journal of mechanical engineering - Mašinstvo. The frequency counts of relative clause were identified and the clauses were classified based on their restrictiveness, relativizers, and, in the English subcorpus, their form. The findings indicate that restrictive clauses dominate both subcorpora, while the choice of relativizers remains similar. However, translation reveals interesting differences such as the use of reduced relative clauses in English to represent various B/C/S expressions. Thus, the research yields pedagogically significant insights for ESP instruction, given the limited contrastive analysis of relative clauses in the field.
Data curation, A.T. and Đ.Š.; Formal Analysis, A.T. and Đ.Š.; Methodology, A.T. and Đ.Š.; Writing – original draft, A.T. and Đ.Š.; Writing – review & editing, A.T. and Đ.Š. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
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