"that" ~ zero

[Mark Davies]

On [+/- that] with verbs, interesting chart from data in the TIME Corpus at:

http://www.americancorpus.org/charts/verbThat.xls

It shows a clear and sustained decrease (60% or so) in the use of 'that' (she thinks (that) he knows) since the 1960s.

Mark D.

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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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