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Rivalling Noun-Dependent Complements in Modern English: that‑Clauses and ‘Complex’ Gerunds

  • Günter Rohdenburg EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: June 11, 2019
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From the journal Anglia Volume 137 Issue 2

Abstract

This corpus‑based paper explores the history and present status of the contrast between noun‑dependent that‑clauses and ‘complex’ gerunds containing their own subjects. With seven of the fifteen nouns under scrutiny, the emergence of the that‑clause either follows that of the gerund or the two complement types emerge at about the same time. This suggests that we will have to qualify the general assumption that since the eighteenth century English has promoted non‑finite subordinate clauses at the expense of finite ones. More crucially, with by far most of the nouns investigated, the that‑clause has gained much further ground over the last few centuries, with American English spearheading this development since the early nineteenth century. In line with the Complexity Principle, the grammatical environments favouring the more explicit that‑clause over the complex gerund include subject complexity and different types of structural discontinuity. Intriguingly, however, the easy‑to‑process there‑clause containing the nouns in question is also found to favour the that‑clause at the expense of the complex gerund.

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Published Online: 2019-06-11
Published in Print: 2019-06-07

© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Frontmatter
  3. Articles
  4. Rivalling Noun-Dependent Complements in Modern English: that‑Clauses and ‘Complex’ Gerunds
  5. New Light on Early Middle English Borrowing from Anglo-Norman: Investigating Kinship Terms in grand‑
  6. Two Personal Names in Recently Found Anglo-Saxon Runic Inscriptions: Sedgeford (Norfolk) and Elsted (West Sussex)
  7. A Reconsideration of the Dialectal Provenance of the Prick of Conscience in Oxford, St John’s College, 57
  8. Reviews
  9. Ivor Timmis. 2018. Historical Spoken Language Research: Corpus Perspectives. Routledge Applied Corpus Linguistics. Abingdon: Routledge, 206 pp., £ 110.00.
  10. Ciaran Arthur. 2018. ‘Charms’, Liturgies, and Secret Rites in Early Medieval England. Anglo-Saxon Studies 32. Woodbridge: Boydell, viii + 252 pp., 3 illustr., £ 60.00.
  11. Jewel Spears Brooker. 2018. T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination. Hopkins Studies in Modernism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 215 pp., $ 49.95.
  12. Nina Engelhardt. 2018. Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 200 pp., £ 75.00.
  13. Philipp Schweighauser. 2016. Beautiful Deceptions – European Aesthetics, the Early American Novel, and Illusionist Art. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 264 pp., $ 45.00.
  14. Michaela Keck. 2018. Deliberately Out of Bounds: Women’s Work on Classic Myth in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. Heidelberg: Winter, 363 pp., € 45.00.
  15. Rüdiger Kunow. 2018. Material Bodies: Biology and Culture in the United States. Heidelberg: Winter, xx + 483 pp., € 66.00.
  16. Verena Jain-Warden. 2017. Pain and Pleasure: The Representation of Bodies and Emotions in Contemporary South African Novels. Reflections: Literatures in English outside Britain and the USA 25. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 226 pp., € 27.50.
  17. Sandra Stadler. 2017. South African Young Adult Literature in English, 2000–2014. Studien zur europäischen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur (SEKL)/Studies in European Children's and Young Adult Literature 4. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, iv + 223 pp., € 35.00.
https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2019-0023

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Frontmatter
  3. Articles
  4. Rivalling Noun-Dependent Complements in Modern English: that‑Clauses and ‘Complex’ Gerunds
  5. New Light on Early Middle English Borrowing from Anglo-Norman: Investigating Kinship Terms in grand‑
  6. Two Personal Names in Recently Found Anglo-Saxon Runic Inscriptions: Sedgeford (Norfolk) and Elsted (West Sussex)
  7. A Reconsideration of the Dialectal Provenance of the Prick of Conscience in Oxford, St John’s College, 57
  8. Reviews
  9. Ivor Timmis. 2018. Historical Spoken Language Research: Corpus Perspectives. Routledge Applied Corpus Linguistics. Abingdon: Routledge, 206 pp., £ 110.00.
  10. Ciaran Arthur. 2018. ‘Charms’, Liturgies, and Secret Rites in Early Medieval England. Anglo-Saxon Studies 32. Woodbridge: Boydell, viii + 252 pp., 3 illustr., £ 60.00.
  11. Jewel Spears Brooker. 2018. T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination. Hopkins Studies in Modernism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 215 pp., $ 49.95.
  12. Nina Engelhardt. 2018. Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 200 pp., £ 75.00.
  13. Philipp Schweighauser. 2016. Beautiful Deceptions – European Aesthetics, the Early American Novel, and Illusionist Art. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 264 pp., $ 45.00.
  14. Michaela Keck. 2018. Deliberately Out of Bounds: Women’s Work on Classic Myth in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. Heidelberg: Winter, 363 pp., € 45.00.
  15. Rüdiger Kunow. 2018. Material Bodies: Biology and Culture in the United States. Heidelberg: Winter, xx + 483 pp., € 66.00.
  16. Verena Jain-Warden. 2017. Pain and Pleasure: The Representation of Bodies and Emotions in Contemporary South African Novels. Reflections: Literatures in English outside Britain and the USA 25. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 226 pp., € 27.50.
  17. Sandra Stadler. 2017. South African Young Adult Literature in English, 2000–2014. Studien zur europäischen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur (SEKL)/Studies in European Children's and Young Adult Literature 4. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, iv + 223 pp., € 35.00.
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