English Transported to Australia: Factors Affecting the Choice of Relativisation Strategies in Diaries Written from 1788 to 1900

Abstract

This paper explores the distribution of different relativisation strategies, namely, the wh-relatives, that and zero, in diaries written in Australia in the last decades of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century. Several factors have been considered in order to determine the reasons behind the choice of these strategies: gender, period, status, syntactic position and animacy of the antecedent. According to the results, wh-relatives were more likely to be used in the first half of the nineteenth century. In addition, the authors with low or average education tended to favour the use of non-case marked relatives to the detriment of wh-relatives. By contrast, gender was determined not to have played a role in the selection of relativisers. Furthermore, syntactic position and animacy of the antecedent also influenced the relative markers that could be present in a specific syntactic slot.

Keywords

• australian english; prescriptivism; relative clauses; late modern english; diaries and journals; dialects