Zero subject relatives (ZSRs)

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 12:34 pm

I suspect the difference between 'see you Thursday' and 'see you on Thursday' is more of a transatlantic difference than a difference in register.

metal56 · Post by **metal56** » Sat Dec 09, 2006 8:36 am

Stephen Jones wrote:I suspect the difference between 'see you Thursday' and 'see you on Thursday' is more of a transatlantic difference than a difference in register.

Do you think that dialect speakers who use such as this:

I have this friend >goes hunting regularly.

There's a tree >sits at the top of the hill.

It was Dave >did it

are speaking in a certain register in their eyes? Or are you calling it "register" from your Standard English POV?

MrPedantic · Post by **MrPedantic** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 8:36 pm

I don't often hear this structure in spoken BrE. It turns up from time to time in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama; also in Chaucer.

A song by Kirsty MacColl in the 80s had the chorus "There's a guy works down the chip shop swears he's Elvis": double ZSR.

It seems more common when introduced by "there is/are/was/were" or "it is/was". But I may be wrong.

MrP

metal56 · Post by **metal56** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 9:23 pm

MrPedantic wrote:I don't often hear this structure in spoken BrE. It turns up from time to time in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama; also in Chaucer.

A song by Kirsty MacColl in the 80s had the chorus "There's a guy works down the chip shop swears he's Elvis": double ZSR.

It seems more common when introduced by "there is/are/was/were" or "it is/was". But I may be wrong.

MrP

Yes, existentials:

There's a man outside wants to see you.

Apparently, an example from Southern British English:

"They're still building them high rise flats are going up all over the
place."

Just reading this article:

Extract: "This large-scale corpus study documents the use of zero subject relative constructions in spoken American and British English. For this purpose, it makes extensive use of automated retrieval strategies. It shows that zero subject relatives are still present in spoken American and British English, as represented in the British National Corpus and the Longman Spoken American Corpus. Moreover, there is a sharp difference between American English with 2.5% and British English with 13% of subject relatives with zero relativizer. Although zero subject relative constructions are frequently found with existentials and it-clefts they are by no means limited to these constructions. The social variables of the study (most notably age) come from speaker annotation which is used to provide the apparent time dimension. "

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/r ... 1/art00012