Variație sintactică în domeniul complementizării: că vs faptul că

This chapter analyzes a specific hypostasis of the shell-noun fapt (‘fact’): its use in the construction faptul că (‘the fact that’), in variation with the complementizer că (‘that’). Based on data from the roTenTen16 and roTenTen21 corpora, as well as the digital library Arcanum, we confirm a tendency for the expansion of this construction, creating conditions for its potential reanalysis as a complex complementizer. Statistical results also highlight the influence of stylistic and sociolinguistic factors in this linguistic change, particularly speakers’ attitudes towards “euphonic” versus “cacophonic” sequences.