Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

Cleft and identificational constructions 211
our examples for object ClCs also occur without relative pronoun (40 vs 15), as in
this example with double focus marker:
(14) No, no, Sir, I am the Thorn that galls him; ’tis me, ’tis me he hates;
(Colley Cibber, The Non-Juror (1718); ChHEDD)
Support for this analysis comes from the agreement pattern in the following relative
clause: in all except a handful of examples with an overt relative pronoun, the
verb agrees with the first person pronoun and not with the relativizer, e.g.,
(15) The Tempter, or the Tempted, who sins most? ha?
Not she: nor doth she tempt: but it is I,
That, lying by the Violet in the Sunne,
Doe as the Carrion do’s, not as the flowre,
(Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, act II, sc. 2; OTA ll. 927–930)
One further piece of evidence concerns the overall development of relative marking
in EModE. Beal has pointed out that, with respect to relativization patterns,
“the position in 1600 appears to be one of maximal variability, with that, zero and
all wh-relatives available” (Beal 2004: 75). In ClCs, on the other hand, the tendency
to omit the relative pronoun altogether was even more pronounced than in relative
clauses generally (Ball 1994: 185), a fact that is indicative of the monoclausal ClC
structure sketched above. 6
This preference for zero relative pronouns in ClCs is still very much alive in
contemporary dialects of British English, as Herrmann (2005:62–70) has shown.
She has classified ClCs as “topicalization structures” which occupy one end of her
“continuum of relative clauses” (2005: 62), with the “relative clause proper” being at
the other end. This scale is highly relevant for the distribution of zero relativizers:
In dialectal speech, the constraint on zero subject relative clauses is overridden
the more a clause type moves away from the modification of an antecedental
noun phrase (‘relative clause proper’) toward the topicalization of a noun phrase
(topicalization structures). [… Zero subject relative clauses] occur with increasing
ease (in a given dialect or idiolect), as one goes […] to clear topicalization
clauses like clefts and all-pseudo-clefts, while they are very scarce in pure modification
structures (‘relative clauses proper’). (Herrmann 2005: 67)
6. Ball’s figures from her corpus study of ‘Relative pronouns in it-clefts’ (1994) may serve as
a first approximation: for the 17th century, she counts 18% zero-complementizers in clefts and
none in restrictive relative clauses with a personal subject. In our data, there are 333 subject
ClCs without and 275 with a relative pronoun. The fact that 55% of all ClCs in our corpus have
no overt relative pronoun, three times as many as in Ball’s corpus, is probably also due to the
genre which reflects “colloquial spoken discourse” (Ball 1994: 185) and has favoured the zero
option throughout.