Non-restrictive Relative Clauses in English Interior Design Texts

Abstract

This study investigates the semantic denotations of non - restrictive relative clauses (i.e., I love this wallpaper, which I found online and just couldn’t resist) in English interior design texts. While previous studies focused on non - restrictive relative clauses in different texts, such as novels, newspapers and business texts, this study adds to the field by focusing on English interior design texts. Today, the university programs in architecture are ranked the top selected to be studied (QS university ranking by subjects); however, English for architecture is the most neglected for ESP (Fidyati & Dafrina, 2017). As indicated by Burton (2012), non - restrictive relative clauses are a common structure to be found in English as a Foreign Language (ELT) coursebooks (Burton, 2012). The data collection of non - restrictive relative clauses in interior design texts in this study was derived from seven best - selling interior design texts (amazon.com). Approximately 200,000 words contain 138 tokens. The data to be studied was manually extracted. The non - restrictive relative clauses in the data analysis were classified by types. The data analysis was validated by three experts in the field via Index of item - objective congruence (IOC). The results show that there are 8 types of non - restrictive relative clauses where the relativizer which occurs the most at 92.76%. The results also show that the semantic denotations of non - restrictive relative clauses in this study are history, position, ownership, components, background information of the components, application, cause and effect and subjectivity. The percentage of historical interpretation appears the highest at 23.19 percent. It is hoped that the results of this study will be beneficial to learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) and EFL learners who study architecture overseas or in international programs regarding how to make contents of non - restrictive relative clauses in interior design texts become interesting and how to present information of interior design systematically and effectively.