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The purpose of this study was to explore the function of English restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses in discourse cohesion and also intended to examine the possible differences between comprehension and production of restrictive relative clauses and non-restrictive relative clauses and their sub-types. Centering Theory was adopted as a framework to evaluate the coherence of discourse. To this end, 200 Iranian EFL language learners (112 females and 88 males) majoring in English as a foreign language, selected based on convenience sampling from Marvdasht and Shiraz Islamic Azad universities. They did two researcher-made tests, namely a 20-item reading comprehension test and a writing test. The reading comprehension test required the participants to read sentences containing a main and subordinate relative clause and choose the correct choice from 3 proposed answers. Likewise, to analyze their writing and productions in terms of relative clauses, the participants were asked to read 20 sentences consisting of a main clause followed by a blank in which they needed to create a sentence using a relative clause. algorithm was utilized to analyze the data. The results suggested that the participants understood and produced restrictive relative clauses better than non-restrictive relative clauses. Moreover, Identifying restrictive relative clauses and Continuative non-restrictive relative clauses were understood and produced better than Classifying restrictive relative clauses, Subjectivity, and Relevance non-restrictive relative clauses, respectively. The results of this study carry crucial pedagogical implications for teachers, language learners, and syllabus designers.

The paper proposes an account of asymmetries in agreement patterns that obtain in restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses headed by hybrid agreement nouns d(j)eca ‘children’, braća ‘brothers’, and gospoda ‘gentry’ in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS). We note that relative clauses headed by hybrid nouns display different possibilities of agreement morphology on the relative pronoun koji/a/e ‘which’, depending, on the one hand, on whether the relative clause is restrictive or non-restrictive and on the other, on the case of the relative pronoun. We argue that the observed differences are the result of a conspiracy of the following factors: (i) hybrid number-agreement nouns introduce a null plural pronoun unspecified for gender (Postal 1966; den Dikken 2001; Torrego and Laga 2015), (ii) all plural case forms of the relative pronoun except for nominative and accusative show full gender syncretism (Alsina and Arsenijević 2012b), and (iii) non-restrictive relative clauses involve a null definite pronoun and attach to the head noun higher than the restrictive relative clauses (Postal 1994; de Vries 2002; 2006). We maintain that the facts discussed in the paper argue against analyses which derive the differences between restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses from their LF representations, rather than from their overt syntax.

The paper proposes a classification of restrictive relative clauses. The term is argued to have been misapplied to designate contrastive restrictive relative clauses exclusively.