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In:Diachronic Corpora, Genre, and Language Change
Edited by Richard J. Whitt
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 85] 2018
► pp. 219–240

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Variation of sentence length across time and genre

Influence on syntactic usage in English

 | University of Freiburg
Published online: 8 November 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.85.10rud
The goal of this paper is threefold: (i) to present some practical aspects of using the full-text version of the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), the largest diachronic multi-genre corpus of the English language, in the investigation of a linguistic trend of change; (ii) to test a widely held assumption that sentence length in written English has been steadily decreasing over the past few centuries; (iii) to point to a possible link between changes in sentence length and changes in English syntactic usage. The empirical proof of concept for (iii) is provided by the decline in the frequency of the non-finite purpose subordinator in order to. Sentence length, genre and the likelihood of occurrence of in order to are shown to be interrelated.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Sentence length in written English: The diachronic evolution across genres
    • 2.1Just a matter of punctuation conventions?
  • 3.A comprehensive analysis of sentence length in the time period of 1800–2000
    • 3.1Design of the analysis and methodology
      • 3.1.1Full-text COHA
      • 3.1.2Genres in COHA
      • 3.1.3Sentence tokenisation: Methodology
    • 3.2Results
    • 3.3Discussion
  • 4.Sentence length and syntactic usage
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • Corpora
  • References
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