Trends in French sentence length?
"Memoirs of a Woman of Long Sentences" (5/21/2022) reproduced a plot from my 5/20/2022 talk at SHEL 12:
In the talk's slides, I used that plot (without the outlier-marking arrow) as a way of illustrating the obvious point that "Older texts in English tend to have longer sentences".
And in my final slide, I suggested that "French seems different". That (imprudent) suggestion was based on my subjective impression of a few 18th-century works, where it seemed to me that sentence (and especially paragraph) lengths were much shorter in French-language works than in English-language ones from the same period.
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