No abstract

Subject extraposition (e.g. it is important to remember) is generally considered to be a formal construction that learners, whose writing is often said to be overly informal, have been found to struggle with. This study investigates to what extent register and text type can be used to explore learners’ reportedly “informal” use of this construction. Learner writing is compared to expert writing from several different registers and to native-speaker student writing. The results show that there are important differences across both registers and text types. Furthermore, while the learners’ use is most like that of the experts’ academic writing, certain similarities to the non-academic registers were also noted. The results additionally suggest that earlier claims about the informal status of learner writing seem mainly to have been influenced by the text types included in the corpora previously investigated.

This study investigates whether I'm sure seems to be on the same grammaticalisation trajectory as I think. It does so by tracking the frequency of these two constructions over time to explore (i) their distribution across clausal positions (syntagmatic variability) and (ii) the extent to which the complementiser that is omitted (paradigmatic variability). The study uses spoken data from the BNC and the newly compiled Spoken BNC2014. The results show that the two constructions exhibit remarkable similarity, not only in terms of their proportional distribution across clausal positions, but also in terms of their propensity for that-omission. For example, both constructions show adverb-like behaviour with regard to clausal positions. Furthermore, even though the time span covered is relatively short, a clear increase in that-omission was noted for I'm sure, mirroring the frequencies for I think very closely. It thus seems that I'm sure is on the same path as I think, despite differences in frequency entrenchment.

This study tests whether the syntactic status of the subject–adjective combination I’m/I am sure is similar to the subject–verb combination I think (i.e., whether it exhibits the same signs of grammaticalisation along two different parameters). More specifically, the study is concerned with the ability of I’m/I am sure to (i) occur in clause-medial and clause-final position, and with (ii) its preference for that-omission, by comparing the behaviour of I’m/I am sure with the results reported for I think in previous studies. The results show that I’m/I am sure behaves in a similar way to I think both in terms of its ability to occur in clause-medial and clause-final position, and in terms of its preference for that-omission. However, sure is both much less frequent than think in general, and is also proportionally less dominant among the class of adjectival predicates followed by that-clauses than think is among verbal predicates. This makes it difficult to argue that they have developed independently through the same frequency correlation. Instead, I argue that sure and think are part of the same grammaticalised constructional schema, and that the frequency of think could be seen to have an impact on the grammatical status of the parallel construction with sure.

This study tests the applicability of the Complexity Principle (Rohdenburg 1996) and the Uniform Information Density Principle (Jaeger 2010) on adjectival data as regards the variation between retaining and omitting the complementizer that in English adjectival complementation constructions. More specifically, the study tests the effect of different factors of potential importance on this variation across extraposed (e.g. It was inevitable (that) he should be nicknamed ‘the Ferret’) and post-predicate clauses (e.g. I'm happy (that) we are married). While both the factors concerned with the Complexity Principle and the Uniform Information Density Principle are found to have an effect on post-predicate clauses, less clear effects are found concerning extraposed clauses. I attribute these findings to the difference between the two constructions in terms of their frequency of co-occurrence with different matrix subject types and with different adjectives.