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Part of
Exploring Language and Society with Big Data: Parliamentary discourse across time and space
Edited by Minna Korhonen, Haidee Kotze and Jukka Tyrkkö
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 111] 2023
► pp. 250–276

Chapter 9
Processing and prescriptivism as constraints on language variation and change

Relative clauses in British and Australian English parliamentary debates

| Ghent University
| Utrecht University | North-West University
| KU Leuven

We investigate the choice between the relative markers which and that in 8,283 restrictive relative clauses on subject position, with inanimate antecedents, in a written corpus consisting of British and Australian Hansard materials over five sampling years (1901, 1935, 1965, 1995, 2015). Our aim is to determine how processing-related factors and prescriptivism-related factors influence processes of language variation and change across two varieties of English. We analyse how the language-external variables of period and variety (British, Australian) interact with two groups of language-internal variables, namely predictors related to language processing and linguistic predictors associated with prescriptivism. The analysis shows that the relativiser that has been on the rise over the past century. The increase is particularly pronounced in the British Hansard, as which was comparatively frequent in early twentieth-century British material. As to the relative importance of predictors, we find that language-external predictors are the most important in conditioning the variation in relative markers, followed by processing-related constraints. Prescriptivism-related variables tend to generally be less important in this type of variation.

Keywords: restrictive relative clause, Australian English, British English, real-time study, language processing, prescriptivism
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1The relative marker alternation
    • 2.2Australian English
    • 2.3Prescriptivism, varieties of English and language change
  • 3.Methods and data
    • 3.1The Hansard: A hybrid spoken-written register
    • 3.2The variable context and corpus retrieval
    • 3.3Predicting relativiser choice
      • 3.3.1Language-external predictors
      • 3.3.2Prescriptivism-related predictors
      • 3.3.3Predictors related to language processing
    • 3.4Analysis
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Distributional analysis of the relative markers which and that
    • 4.2Probing the importance of constraints on relativiser choice
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.111.09lab
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