Sentence length and syntactic complexity
Don Keyser,
Language Log,
Mar 30, 2022
What I found remarkable about this post was how lucid and clear I found the excerpts from Ivanhoe to be. I've never read the novel (I will, now) but I luxuriated in the cadence of the sentence as it led me from thought to thought, drawing a picture of the story Walter Scott wanted me to comprehend. Ironic, thus, to find these as examples used to demonstrate syntactic complexity. To be sure, viewed a certain way (for example, as an exercise in diagramming sentences a la Chomsky) they are complex. But, I think, they were never meant to be understood in terms of rules and structures. Nor, I think, are most works. (p.s. I rarely use semicolons to wrestle myself into syntactic contortions, but I make liberal use of brackets and dashes to achieve the same effect.)
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