A multifactorial analysis of that/zero alternation : a diachronic study of the grammaticalization of the zero complementizer construction with think, guess and understand

This corpus-based study uses a stepwise logistic regression analysis to examine the diachronic development of that/zero alternation with three verbs of cognition, viz. think, guess and understand in both spoken and written corpora from 1560U+20132012. Eleven structural features which have been claimed in the literature to predict the presence of the zero complementizer form are tested to see if (1) there is indeed a diachronic trend towards more zero use, (2) whether the conditioning factors proposed in the literature indeed predict the zero form, (3) to what extent these factors interact and (4) whether the predictive power of the conditioning factors becomes stronger or weaker over time. The analysis disproves the hypothesis that there has been an overall diachronic development towards more zero use and that the interactions with verb type brings to light differences between verbs in terms of the predictive power of the individual structural features.

ISBN:9789027266606

Jaar van publicatie:2016

Toegankelijkheid:Open