That-clauses as complements of verbs or nouns

Many types of verb in English permit a that-clause complement, including factual and suasive verbs like acknowledge, point out, recommend, suggest, etc.: (1) I assume she acknowledges that it was a blunder (2015, COCA) I refer to this construction as ‘V + that’. Other transitive verbs like advance, contest, contradict, endorse, highlight, moot, pose, put forward, propound, uncover are not supposed to take that-clauses, and by and large in the pre-2000 corpora they don't. Instead such verbs take a nominal object, one form of which can be a ‘shell noun’ (abstracts like fact, claim, argument, situation) with a that-clause as complement of the noun, a construction referred here to as ‘shell +that’. Both a simple NP and an NP containing a that-clause are illustrated in (2): (2) And I think Lord Scarman's right to highlight the era of human rights and the fact that the police are the key institution in our society (DCPSE) In recent English, simple that-clause complements are spreading to such verbs in the active, (3) (3) a. In the first issue of Salvage, Neil Davidson mooted that neoliberalism may be undermining the basis for capital accumulation itself. (2015, China Miéville, ‘On Social Sadism’, Salvage http://salvage.zone/in-print/on-social-sadism/ 17 Dec 2015) b. The renowned Millennium Ecosystem Assessment [...] highlights that coasts are the most highly degraded ecosystems on our planet. (2005, COHA) In this paper I explore data from COHA bearing on the development from shell + that to V + that, discussing the difficulties of getting reliable evidence. The topic also raises a tricky problem for corpus linguists, namely whether it is ever legitimate to talk of native speakers not being in full control of some registers of their own language. Not final version. Please do not quote without permission. To appear in Subordination: Synchronic and diachronic perspectives (Topics in English Linguistics). Berlin: Mouton.