Zero vs. "that" relatives

[Mark Davies]

I know I'm coming into this a few days late, but ...

>> i found the "that" a bit jarring, and would have preferred a zero
>> relative:
>>    "With the market and everything being the way it is ..."
>> a google search (with dupes removed) pulled up:
>>    {"being the way that it is"}  270 hits
>>    {"being the way it is"}  845 hits

Data from the 100 million word TIME Corpus (http://corpus.byu.edu/time), comparing:

[nn*] that he/she [p*] [v*]             +that   e.g. '(the) car that he/she bought'
[nn*] he/she [v*]                       -that   e.g. '(the) car that he/she bought'

You can see a sustained decrease in the use of "that" (vs. zero) with relative clauses during the past 40 years (see http://www.americancorpus.org/charts/relatives.xls). It looks like the use of 'that' in relatives has decreased about 50% during this time.

Best,

Mark Davies

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Mark Davies
Professor of (Corpus) Linguistics
Brigham Young University
(phone) 801-422-9168 / (fax) 801-422-0906
Web: davies-linguistics.byu.edu

** Corpus design and use // Linguistic databases **
** Historical linguistics // Language variation **
** English, Spanish, and Portuguese **
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