In this article, we investigate the development of complex subordinators from noun complement clauses in English, basing ourselves on the analysis of synchronic data from the COBUILD corpus. We first present a breadth study of complex subordinators originating in “in þ NP þ that/of-clause”- syntagms and show how these align themselves with oppositions within the causal, temporal and comparative subordinator paradigms. We then offer an in-depth study of the cluster of strings “in (the) hope(s) that/of”, arguing that the subordinators they yield enter as marked members into the subparadigm of purposive conjunctions, which they semantically enrich through lexical and structural persistence.