Syntactic Categories Informing Variationist Analysis: The Case of English Copy-raising

This thesis uncovers and investigates of two levels of syntactic change progressing in tandem in Canadian English. One involves the complementizers (Rooryck 2000:48; López-Couso and Méndez-Naya 2012a) that link perception verbs to finite subordinate clauses, e.g. It seems (like/as if/as though/that/Ø) she's getting better quickly. The predominant variant in Canadian English is like (López-Couso and Méndez-Naya 2012; Brook 2011a, 2014) – an incoming form that now represents 68.2 percent of comparative complementizers across corpora of sociolinguistic interviews from Ontario (Tagliamonte 2003-06, 2006, 2007-10, 2010-13, 2013; Tagliamonte and Denis 2014). Looking beyond the variable context, as per Aaron (2010), suggests that a second, broader change is occurring. The entire seem* like structure is overtaking Subject-to-Subject raising (seem* to VP). Younger speakers are increasingly saying It/she seems like she’s getting better quickly rather than She seems to be getting better quickly. I find that the key variationist concept of orderly heterogeneity (Weinreich et al. 1968) applies readily to the covarying syntactic constructions despite their abstract nature. I also address the question of whether one level of change has led to the other. A methodologically comparable corpus from York, England (Tagliamonte 1996-1998, 1998) shows a low proportion of like (13.2 percent) and no broader-level change; I hypothesize that the broader-level shift depends on a certain threshold of like in the community grammar. Since like, unlike its remaining covariants, allows copy-raising (Rogers 1974, Horn 1981, Asudeh 2002, Asudeh and Toivonen 2007, Gisborne 2010, inter alia), it gives speakers the choice of a matrix NP or matrix expletive subject. Experimental/acquisitional research indicates that these two options correspond to different evidential/epistemic values (Rett and Hyams 2014); I argue that with a high proportion of like they together comprise a clear, streamlined binary system that makes Subject-to-Subject raising much less useful in comparison, accounting for its emerging decline.Ph.D