196 Forms of Say
As Figure 7.1 shows, the forms are most common in the Spoken genre, although
that/ this said is also common in the Magazine genre. All of the forms are very
uncommon in the Fiction genre and are relatively uncommon in the Newspaper
and Academic genres. The rarity of absolute constructions (and free adjuncts) in
the most formal prose is noted by Kortmann (1991: 2): “[i] n written language the
frequency of their use decreases proportionally to an increase of the formality of
the text type.” The infrequency of “ that said ” in Fiction is, on fi rst glance, some-
what surprising, as this genre is closely related to speech (Culpeper and Kytö
2010 : 63). However, the function of “that said” is central to the construction of
arguments, not to the narrating of events, and for this reason, we would not expect
gathered in the early 1990s and hence does not refl ect contemporary usage. If we compare
data from 1990– 1994 in COCA (=103,999,130 words), we fi nd 79 examples of the passive
form (hence a frequency of 0.76 per million), and 190 examples of the active (hence of fre-
quency of 1.83 per million). The passive form thus seems to have originally been less frequent
in American English than in British English, but may have become more frequent. This would
need to be tested in a large corpus of Present- day British English.105128645436128156350
1344 50 50(^47323426)
929 193
645
36
65
106
77
0
1
2
Frequency per million
3
4
5
6
7
All Spoken Fiction Magazine Newspaper Academic
this|that said this|that being said
this|that having been said having said this|that
929 193
Figure 7.1 Distribution of forms of “that said” by subcorpus in COCA
(Searched March 21, 2016.)