2013 Teacher's exam on Restrictive and Nonrestrictive Clauses

First, restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses differ in terms of punctuation and prosodic features. In terms of punctuation, nonrestrictive relative clauses accompany short pauses and commas around it whereas restrictive clauses do not. Nonrestrictive ones do so because their role is only to provide additional information about their antecedent regardless of the flow of their main clause, so they need to be separated from the main clause. On the other hand, restrictive clauses are needed to identify their antecedent, and they need to be read right after them without pauses in speech communication. In terms of prosodic characteristics, nonrestrictive clauses apply rising-falling intonation pattern to their antecedent, while it is not adopted in that of restrictive clauses. To be specific, nonrestrictive clause is an additional which can be separated from its main clause, but restrictive is not. This brings whether it uses rising-falling intonation to imply that it is separated, or original intonation to show that it is part of the main clause. Second, two different sentences can be made to illustrate the given pictures. The one for picture 1 may be, ‘The girls, who are wearing a skirt, are dancing. The other one for picture two can be, ‘The girls who are wearing a skirt are dancing.’ This difference comes from the two pictures where all the girls are wearing a skirt as in picture 1, and only some of them wearing a skirt as in picture 2. The fact that wearing a skirt does work to identify the antecedent in 2, which means that the clause should be restrictive, but it does not in 1, and it means that a nonrestrictive clause should be used. Third, there are several nonrestrictive modifications from the underlined modifiers in . To begin with, 1 is nonrestrictive because Ted Baker is a name of a certain person which itself identifies the reference. The clause only provides additional information about the head. Next, 2 is also a nonrestrictive since it modifies ‘his