A corpus-based of relative clauses in 18th and 19th century australian english

Abstract

This study aims at analysing relative clauses in Australian English from 1788 to 1900 and the possible influence which 18th and 19th century grammarians had on the first settlers and, lately, on the Australian inhabitants. The main objective is to analyse the different relativization strategies, that is, case-marked wh- relatives, the invariable that,and the gap relativizer zero, and the effect of prescriptive grammars, which could be seen on the medium, written or oral, and the formality of the context. These two factors may result in the use of any of the strategies previously described either by following normative principles or by slowly distancing from such precepts, which might contribute to an endonormative innovation from a linguistic exonormative reality based on British English. Additionally, this investigation could determine to what extent the text category and the medium may affect the distribution of relatives, the syntactic functions which they realize, the placement of the preposition when complementing a preposition, and the typology, that is, restrictive or non-restrictive. In conclusion, this research will contribute to a detailed analysis which allows, on the one hand, to learn about some aspects of early Australian English and, on the other hand, a diachronic view of this specific variety or a future contrastive analysis with other varieties of English...