Quotative [to be] + "that"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Mar 26, 2005, at 4:48 PM, I wrote:

> Begin forwarded message:
>
>> From: Isabelle K Buchstaller <ibuch at stanford.edu>
>> Date: March 26, 2005 1:31:01 AM PST
>> To: "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu>
>> Subject: Re: Quotative [to be] + "that"
>>
>> Here are some examples with 'was' from my corpus.
>> They are all direct speech...

to make this all more interesting: there's a real possibility that the
plain-"be" examples were the earliest, and that nobody noticed them
until they got expanded with "like", "all", etc.

arnold