The Omissibility of That in Noun Complement Clause: Corpus Evidence  

Oleh:

Hidarto, Anderson ; Andrianto, Steve

Jenis: Article from Proceeding
Dalam koleksi: CONCORPS: The 3rd Atma Jaya Conference on Corpus Studies, Gaining Better Insights Into Language Through Corpora, Jakarta, August 21, 2015, page 15-36.
Topik: corpus study; colligation; noun complement clause; that-clause; omission
Fulltext: hal 15.pdf (11.76MB)

Isi artikel

Colligation, “the grammatical company a word or word sequence keeps (or avoids keeping) either within its own group or at a higher rank” (Hoey, 2005, p. 43), is one linguistic aspect that can be investigated by means of corpora (Anderson & Corbett, 2009). Indeed, colligation has been made the main theme of a myriad of recently published grammar books, for example Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad and Finegan (1999). They explicitly claimed in their Introduction chapter that the grammar “adopts a corpus-based approach” (Biber et al., 1999, p. 4). This claim can be taken as a guarantee that “the grammatical descriptions are based on the patterns of structure and use found in a large collection of spoken and written texts, stored electronically, and searchable by computer” (p. 4). This claim, however, may not apply to each and every one of the grammatical descriptions because there is one grammatical construction called “noun complement clauses” (e.g. p. 644) that, in our view, they fail to describe fully satisfactorily. They asserted that “[t]he complementizer that cannot be omitted in that complement clauses controlled by nouns” (p. 645). This assertion is further emphasized in the abridged version of the grammar, in which they reiterated that omission of that is “impossible” in noun complement clause (Biber, Conrad, & Leech, 2002, p. 300). In this paper, we would like to show that such a description of that omission in sentences containing noun complement clauses is not completely accurate. While it is true that in many cases the complementizer that is not omitted, in some cases it can be omitted. In other words, the complementizer that, as confirmed by corpus data, should be regarded as being optional rather than non-omissible. Our claim that the complementizer that is omissible will be substantiated by data derived from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Additionally, the distribution of this that omission across noun categories and registers is also provided along with the analysis of which is the more significant factor affecting that omission between the two.

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