192 Forms of Say
comment clauses in Present- day English are discussed, followed by an exam-
ination of their fi rst known occurrences in English, their syntactic origins, and
their semantic development.
7.2 The “That Said” Construction
7.2.1 The Construction in Present- Day English
There are a number of variants of the construction in question, including three
different passive forms and one active form, as exemplifi ed with PDE corpus
examples in (1). I will refer to it with a cover term, namely, the “that said”
construction:
{that, this} said (1a– b)
{that, this} being said (1c– d)
{that, this} having been said (1e– f)
having said {that, this} (1g– h)(1) a. We have a clear frontrunner with Barack Obama. That said , all the sort of
dancing on Hillary’s grave I think is premature. (2008 The big story with John
Gibson [COCA])
b. This said , it seems to me also obvious that the idea of the museum is not the
way forward to reach the objectives of the reconciliation process between
Turks and Armenians, (2002 New York Times [COCA])
c. I have total confi dence he will get it done. That being said , you don’t
see hardly anybody with a perfect score for their entire career ... (2004
Washington Post [COCA])
d. This being said , given the current results, the strongest design may well be
to use both types of measures (2012 Journal of Speech, Language & Hearing
Research [COCA])
e. What is important, to restate, is that they have found no cases of human to
human transmission. ... Well, that having been said , experts say that could
come at any time. (2006 CNN Insight [COCA])
f. This having been said , it is clear that South Africa is a fragile experiment.
(2010 Anthropological Quarterly [COCA])
g. Having said that , the president’s budget has an Achilles heel. (2011 Fox
Baier [COCA])
h. Having said this , I do not mean to imply that Thin Leather somehow rep-
resents failure in the Pima community. (2010 American Indian Quarterly
[COCA])
Syntactically, that/ this (having been/ being) said is analyzable as an “absolute
construction ” (see Kortmann 1991: 10ff.), a non- fi nite structure with a nom-
inal element and a participle which has no syntactic link to the main clause.
Huddleston and Pullum include absolute constructions such as this done among