7.2 The “That Said” Construction 195pages and dark one in the history of all peoples and countries ... Each nation
has to assume its history as a whole.” This functions as a softener, or hedge, as
it suggests that Turkey is assuming responsibility for its actions. Mr. Sanberk
can then forcefully present his position that the museum would make reconcili-
ation more rather than less diffi cult. This functions as a booster.7.2.2 Frequency of “That Said” in Present-day English
A construction often comes to public attention when its frequency increases
(see Safi re 2002 ). Is this the case with collocations of “that said”?
A study of forms of “that said” in COCA and BYU- BNC (see Table 7.1 )
shows that the forms are not particularly high frequency, ranging from
1.50 to 3.42 per million. That is more common than this (e.g., COCA has
1,021 examples of [punc] that said [comma] vs. 30 examples of [punc]
this said [comma]). The passive forms ( that/ this said , that/ this being said ,
that/ this having been said ) are substantially more common in American
English than in British English , whereas the active forms ( having said
that/ this ) are somewhat more common in British English than in American
English.^2Table 7.1 Frequency of “that said” in COCA and the BYU- BNC aCOCA BYU- BNC
{that, this} said, b
[punc] {that, this} said [comma] 1051 113
[conj] {that, this} said [comma] 91 6
with {that, this} said [comma] 83 3
all (of) {that, this} said [comma] 85 4
{that, this} being said 350 20
{that, this} having been said 47 4
Total passive forms 1707 150
Frequency per million – passive forms 3.28 1.50
having said {that, this} [comma] 929 243
Frequency per million – active forms 1.79 2.43a.^ Search conducted March 21, 2016.
b.^ Because the two- word gram that/ this said can occur in a number of construc-
tions and syntactic contexts, four separate searches were used to identify the
absolute construction.
2 Van de Pol and Petré (2015: 206) fi nd that only 1% of absolutes are perfect participles in their
corpus of primarily British English. Some caution is needed here as the BYU- BNC data was