Fwd: Zero vs. "that" relatives

[Arnold Zwicky]

meant for the list, but mistakenly sent only to Mark Davies.  i'm
forwarding it now, and will forward further exchanges with him on the
subject.

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Date: December 29, 2008 8:11:02 AM PST
> To: Mark Davies <Mark_Davies at BYU.EDU>
> Subject: Re: Zero vs. "that" relatives
>
>
> On Dec 29, 2008, at 7:10 AM, Mark Davies wrote:
>
>> ... 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.
>
> about 40% decrease between the 1970s and the 2000s.  following an
> approximately 60% *increase* between the 1930s and the 1970s.  i
> have no idea what to make of either of these developments.
>
> arnold
>
>
>

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