Faktore wat die weglating van die Afrikaanse onderskikker dat bepaal

Abstract

Verb complement clauses in written Afrikaans have two formal variants. One form has an overt complementiser dat "that", followed by dependent word order (dat+SXV), while the other form has no complementiser and independent word order (Ø+SVX). Previous research on Afrikaans has not yielded conclusive findings about the factors that influence the choice between the variants, although the factors conditioning the alternation have been studied extensively in English and German. Based on that research, a number of potential conditioning factors are identified, which relate to the syntactic complexity of the main clause (its subject, modification of tense and modality features of the main verb, passivisation, negation or additional modifiers between the main clause and the complement clause); the semantics, lexical choice and frequency of the verb of the main clause; and the formality of the register. This article adopts corpus linguistics as method to determine which factors best predict the choice between the variants. The data are drawn from the Taalkommissiekorpus ("Corpus of the Language Commission"), which is a 57 million word corpus of contemporary written Afrikaans. A sample of 10 084 instances of the declarative complement clause were extracted from the corpus by using 104 different verb lemmas (see Appendix A) as extraction terms. These were classified manually for their complementation pattern, and all the potential features identified as potential conditioning factors in the literature review were annotated for every valid instance in the sample. The classified data were then subjected to decision tree modelling, to yield a classification tree that identifies the most important factors related to the choice between the two variants of the declarative complement construction in Afrikaans.