A Diasystematic Construction Grammar analysis of language change in the Afrikaans and English finite verb complement clause construction

Afrikaans adopted a new formal variant of the complement clause during language contact from English, the variant that allows omission of the overt complementiser. Based on a corpus analysis of letters from the 18th century to the end of the 20th century, the forms and semantic functions of the construction in both languages are analysed and compared. Results show that the omission of the complementiser jumped from negligible frequency to an established variant before and after contact. The function of the Afrikaans complementiser clause also changes to converge with English after contact. The findings indicate that the initial complement clause constructions of Afrikaans and English would have been different in respect of form and function, but over time, the Afrikaans construction becomes close to identical to the English construction (which in turns show rather limited change over time), pointing to the gradual formation of a diaconstruction from two related idioconstructions, at least for bilingual users of these two languages.