Variation of sentence length across time and genre

TL;DR

This study uses the Corpus of Historical American English to analyze how sentence length and syntactic features have changed over time across genres, revealing a decline in sentence length and links to syntactic usage shifts.

Contribution

It demonstrates practical methods for analyzing diachronic linguistic trends using a large multi-genre corpus and investigates the relationship between sentence length and syntactic change.

Findings

Sentence length has decreased over centuries.

A decline in the use of 'in order to' correlates with sentence length.

Genre influences sentence length and syntactic patterns.

Abstract

The goal of this paper is threefold: i) to present some practical aspects of using full-text version of 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 the changes in sentence length and changes in the 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.