Complex subordinators derived from noun complement clauses

In this article, we investigate the development of complex subordinators
from noun complement clauses in English, basing ourselves on the analysis
of synchronic data from the COBUILD corpus. We first present a breadth
study of complex subordinators originating in “in þ NP þ that/of-clause”-
syntagms and show how these align themselves with oppositions within the
causal, temporal and comparative subordinator paradigms. We then offer an
in-depth study of the cluster of strings “in (the) hope(s) that/of”, arguing that
the subordinators they yield enter as marked members into the subparadigm
of purposive conjunctions, which they semantically enrich through lexical
and structural persistence.