Zero that-clauses in the history of English. A historical sociolinguistic approach (1424–1681)

Abstract

AbstractThe present paper traces the history of zero and that as competing links for object clauses in the history of English from chronological and sociolinguistic perspectives. Even though the zero link is sporadically attested in Old English, the rise of the zero complementizer takes place in late Middle English and is well-established in the second half of the sixteenth century, becoming more frequent in speech-based text types (trials, sermons) or in texts representing the oral mode of expression (fiction, comedies). The use of this construction is then observed to diminish drastically in the eighteenth century, plausibly as a result of the prescriptive bias of grammarians (Warner 1982; Fanego 1990; Rissanen 1991, Rissanen 1999; Finegan and Biber 1995). Our analysis is based on five high frequency verbs, to know, to think, to say, to tell and to hope, and their syntactic behaviour in the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, especially in the periods 1424–1499, 1500–1569, 1570–1639 and 1640–1681. Our approach aims at showing progress of the zero link along the S curve in these four periods, before it became thwarted in the eighteenth century. We also aim at plotting the diffusion of zero that-clauses against the social hierarchy of the period in order to detect (i) the existence of social stratification for this variant, and, if such be the case, (ii) the social group or groups that were leading the diffusion of the change in the different chronological stages, thus (iii) tracing the social origin and direction of the change as diffusing from below or from above in sociolinguistic terms.