That-clauses: Retention and Omission of Complementizer that in some Varieties of English

Abstract

An OBJECT CLAUSE, also sporadically referred to as a COMMENT CLAUSE (Warner 1982: 169; Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 951), is that kind of clause functioning as the direct object of the matrix verb. In English, the most common type of object clause is introduced by the complementizer that, hence its traditional label that-clause (Quirk et al. 1985: 1049). Regarding its different usages when occurring in post-predicate position, these constructions are employed to report the speech (i.e. He said that nine indictments have been returned publicly in such investigations), thoughts (i.e. I think Stuart’s gone a bit mad) or attitudes (i.e. I was quite confident that it would stay in very well), among others (Biber et al. 1999: 660-661). As observed, the complementizer that can either be retained or omitted with no meaning alteration and Biber et al. (1999: 681-682) enumerated a series of discourse factors favouring that omission (the presence of co-referential subjects in the main clause and the that-clause, among others) and favouring that retention (the use of coordinated that-clauses, among others). Even though the topic has been extensively researched in British and American English (Biber 1999) and the history of English (Fanego 1990a, 1990b; Suárez-Gómez 2000; Calle- Martín and Romero-Barranco 2014), the academia is still in want of such studies in other varieties of contemporary English. This considered, the present paper will analyze that-clauses in Indian English, Hong Kong English and New Zealand English with the following objectives: 1) to analyze the distribution of that/zero in the mentioned varieties of English; 2) to assess the phenomenon in terms of register and the informants’ age and gender; 3) to classify the instances regarding the verb taking the that-clause (i.e. mental verbs, speech act verbs and other communication verbs); and 4) to evaluate the contribution of some factors favouring the omission and the retention of complementizer that in these environments. The source of evidence comes from the New Zealand, Indian and Hong Kong components of the International Corpus of English.