ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates complementizer deletion in that-clauses in the history of English by means of a long-term diachronic quantitative corpus-based approach. On the basis of 49,945 that-clauses drawn from six modern parsed corpora of historical English encompassing a total of about 7.4 million words, the deletion of the complementizer that is charted through Old, Middle, Early Modern, and Late Modern English. It is demonstrated that there is much less complementizer deletion in Old English than expected on the basis of previous research and also that there is considerably more complementizer deletion in early Middle English than suggested by Rissanen’s (1991) seminal early corpus study. The chapter also shows that complementizer deletion is less frequent in Early Modern English than indicated by Rissanen’s (1991) data, and it documents quantitatively that there is a clear decline in complementizer deletion after the Early Modern period, in agreement with previous research. The chapter argues that the Old English and Middle English data provide quantitative support for Jespersen (1905) and Miller (2009, 2012), who argue that complementizer deletion in English may have been influenced by early language contact between Old English and Old Norse, a view opposed by Kirch (1959 ) and Rissanen (1991).
