Sentence length and syntactic complexity
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[This is a guest post by Don Keyser, in response to "Trends" (3/27/22).]
I do hope Sir Walter Scott is part of the study, as an outlier perhaps. I still have nightmares going back to English class in an era when one still was obliged to diagram the sentences to establish to the satisfaction of the teacher that one truly and fully grasped the structure and meaning. Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe was the acid test. I'm not sure blackboards of the era were sufficiently large, or chalk sufficiently sturdy, to get through the diagram of a single sentence in Ivanhoe and other works.
I just checked online and found that there are free versions of Ivanhoe in ebook and .pdf format.
Some examples of all too typical sentences from that work:
On the other hand, such and so multiplied were the means of vexation and oppression possessed by the great Barons, that they never wanted the pretext, and seldom the will, to harass and pursue, even to the very edge of destruction, any of their less powerful neighbours, who attempted to separate themselves from their authority, and to trust for their protection, during the dangers of the times, to their own inoffensive conduct, and to the laws of the land.
Still, however, the necessary intercourse between the lords of the soil, and those oppressed inferior beings by whom that soil was cultivated, occasioned the gradual formation of a dialect, compounded betwixt the French and the Anglo-Saxon, in which they could render themselves mutually intelligible to each other; and from this necessity arose by degrees the structure of our present English language, in which the speech of the victors and the vanquished have been so happily blended together; and which has since been so richly improved by importations from the classical languages, and from those spoken by the southern nations of Europe.
This state of things I have thought it necessary to premise for the information of the general reader, who might be apt to forget, that, although no great historical events, such as war or insurrection, mark the existence of the Anglo-Saxons as a separate people subsequent to the reign of William the Second; yet the great national distinctions betwixt them and their conquerors, the recollection of what they had formerly been, and to what they were now reduced, continued down to the reign of Edward the Third, to keep open the wounds which the Conquest had inflicted, and to maintain a line of separation betwixt the descendants of the victor Normans and the vanquished Saxons.
In defiance of conventual rules, and the edicts of popes and councils, the sleeves of this dignitary were lined and turned up with rich furs, his mantle secured at the throat with a golden clasp, and the whole dress proper to his order as much refined upon and ornamented, as that of a quaker beauty of the present day, who, while she retains the garb and costume of her sect continues to give to its simplicity, by the choice of materials and the mode of disposing them, a certain air of coquettish attraction, savouring but too much of the vanities of the world.
His friends, and he had many, who, as well as Cedric, were passionately attached to him, contended that this sluggish temper arose not from want of courage, but from mere want of decision; others alleged that his hereditary vice of drunkenness had obscured his faculties, never of a very acute order, and that the passive courage and meek good-nature which remained behind, were merely the dregs of a character that might have been deserving of praise, but of which all the valuable parts had flown off in the progress of a long course of brutal debauchery.
I just skimmed through the first five or six chapters to confirm memories of ancient times … seriously, it was traumatic for a kid to be asked to diagram that sort of monstrosity, a bit like doing in one's head the square root of an eight-digit number …
Selected readings
- "Sentence diagramming" (1/1/14)
- "Personal and intellectual history of sentence diagrams" (10/14/04)
- "Nominee for the Trent Reznor Prize" (4/14/12)
- "Diagramming Sentences" (4/14/13)
- "Putting grammar back in grammar schools: A modest proposal" (12/25/13)
- "School grammar, Round two" (12/30/12)
- "Diagrammatic excitement" (3/27/12)
- "Defiant diagramming" (10/5/08)
[(myl) FWIW, my copy of Ivanhoe (1819) is semicolonically more or less in line with historical trends:
1631 semicolons in 1017641 characters: 160.27 per 100k ]
Philip Taylor said,
March 29, 2022 @ 8:36 am
A question and a comment.
Q. Is the "diagramming" of sentences (and perhaps longer or shorter stretches of text) a particularly American phenomenon ? I ask because although we most definitely learned to parse sentences (etc.) at school, I have no recollections whatsoever of ever being asked to "diagram" them.
C. I find some of Scott's commas redundant, and in some cases even "wrong". Herewith my "cleaned up" version of para.~1:
Three superfluous commas removed.
Victor Mair said,
March 29, 2022 @ 9:00 am
I remember diagramming as one of the most exciting and challenging activities in high school English (it may even have begun in junior high). There was always a tremendous sense of achievement when I could take a long, complex sentence and analyze everything so that it all fit together perfectly. After I was done, I would step back from the blackboard and contemplate, nay marvel, at all the lines and branches, which were somehow aesthetically pleasing to my mind. It was almost as much fun as tracing the etymological roots of complicated words, maybe more so, since there was a kinetic element involved in dancing around in front of the blackboard and splaying the parts of the sentence all over it with the piece of chalk in my hand. I felt a bit like Jackson Pollock must have felt when he was splashing and dripping paint on a big canvas with his brush, though my movements were perforce more controlled and constrained.
Ross Presser said,
March 29, 2022 @ 9:35 am
I would put David Copperfield up there with Ivanhoe on the scale of longest, most complex sentences. Many paragraphs are single sentences and it's really hard for me to get through them without falling asleep.
Bloix said,
March 29, 2022 @ 10:25 am
Philip Taylor – here's a five minute instructional video on diagramming sentences. There are many similar videos – this one is short and gives lots of examples.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oemhW9wE5V8
In the unlikely event you decide you want to learn to diagram, you'll want to watch some of the longer ones.
Bloix said,
March 29, 2022 @ 10:33 am
Ross Presser –
years ago when I commuted by car, I used to listen to books on tape (yes, it was that long ago). I enjoyed it and it made me a better driver – calmer and less stressed.
Once, I decided to try Remembrance of Things Past. I couldn't do it! I'd be listening attentively until I got to, say, U Street, and the next thing I knew I was at K Street and hadn't heard a thing.
Simon Wright said,
March 29, 2022 @ 11:19 am
Philip Taylor – I’d go further and remove the last three commas in your edited version as well.
Victor Mair said,
March 29, 2022 @ 11:40 am
I wonder what it would be like to diagram the sentences of the postmodern, Marxist literary theorist, Fredric Jameson. I've met him in person, and his speech is not too hard to understand, but his written sentences are extremely long and convoluted, some of them running on for a whole, interminable paragraph.
Come to think of it, the novelist James Joyce, with his stream of consciousness narrative, would also make a good specimen.
Philip Taylor said,
March 29, 2022 @ 12:42 pm
Unconvinced, Simon. One I regard as absolutely required ("… of the times, to their own …"); one as a marginal candidate for removal ("… their authority, and to trust …") depending on whether "attempted" qualifies only "to separate themselves" or both "to separate themselves" and "to trust for their protection" — I personally think it qualifies only the first, in which case I regard the comma as required]; and one possible candidate ("… their less powerful neighbours, who attempted …") which I regard as required if "the great Barons never wanted the pretext … to harass … any of their less powerful neighbours" and as an error if "the great Barons never wanted the pretext … to harass … any of their less powerful neighbours who attempted to separate themselves …"
Aardvark Cheeselog said,
March 29, 2022 @ 12:55 pm
I think my 4th-grade English textbook had a section on the simplest form of the art, though my class did not use it.
I think you might have been among the last generation to practice this skill. Born in the late 50s and attending high school in the later 70s, I saw various clues in my textbooks that there had once been such a thing, but I was never required to do it.
DMcCunney said,
March 29, 2022 @ 4:55 pm
I recall doing diagramming in elementary school (or perhaps Junior High), and it was kind of fun, just to get an idea of how the pieces fit together. I would *not* wish to do it for anything longer and more complex. I also rather enjoyed etymology, and once handily passed a test in "words that did not originate in English, and where they came from", by simply opening dictionary that had etymological information and pocking e representative sample. (I suspect my teacher was really testing for "did we have dictionaries, Look Stuff Up, and grasp the concept a dictionary could tell us where words originated". That was not an assumption you could make about the students in the school I was attending.)
At this point, I have grammar internalized,and a sentence will simply *feel* wrong. (I have to Look Stuff Up to tell you *why* it's wrong.) I have also found myself missing things like typos and poor grammar because my mind auto-corrects to what the writer meant to say.
Back in the 70s I was vastly amused when I woman I knew asked whether I was always tripping when I saw her. No, I might have been tripping some of the times, but certainly not all. Why did she ask? "It's because of teh way you talk. The only people I know who talk like you are tripping and trying really hard to hold it together." She was referring to my speaking in grammatical sentences. That happens automatically. It's simply the way my mind works, with no effort required.
——
Dennis
Allen Thrasher said,
March 29, 2022 @ 8:16 pm
Bloix,
I also listened to Proust on tape (in English), and I found it easier to follow his long sentences spoken that when reading them. They seemed to embody the natural progression of the narrator's thought.
I once saw a large poster of a sentence from Proust diagrammed.
Allen
Christopher Henrich said,
March 29, 2022 @ 11:24 pm
The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen, contains a sentence that occupies most of a page; I counted 345 words in it. It was that way for a reason: the main character's mind was deteriorating just a bit, with the result that sometimes his thoughts would seem to proliferate uncontrollably. The sentence seemed grammatical to me, and I thought briefly about attempting to diagram it.
GH said,
March 30, 2022 @ 1:46 am
@Philip Taylor:
I would object that this one in particular needs to be struck. It's a remnant of the parenthetical insertion "during the dangers of the times", and when the comma that leads into that insertion is removed, the trailing one must go as well. A comma in "[they] attempted to trust for their protection, to their own inoffensive conduct" seems to me positively ungrammatical, and I wonder if you are perhaps misreading the sentence meaning to insist on it.
GH said,
March 30, 2022 @ 1:51 am
Furthermore, "attempted" must qualify "to trust", because otherwise it would be "trusted".
David N. Evans said,
March 30, 2022 @ 2:13 am
Several months ago, I came across the following 185-word sentence in an essay by the poet and Stanford professor Yvor Winters. I can't imagine trying to diagram it Reed-Kellogg style, and treeing it X-bar style would probably require a chalkboard the size of a football field. Amazingly, the sentence does not contain a single semicolon, parenthesis, or dash, nor does it appear to be in any way technically a run-on sentence. However, without rehearsing it a bit, I do find it challenging to process.
"If we can disengage ourselves sufficiently, then, from the preconception that 16th century poetry is essentially Petrarchist, to sift the good poems, regardless of school of method, from the bad, we shall find that the Petrarchist movement produced nothing worth remembering between Skelton and Sidney, in spite of a tremendous amount of Petrarchan experimentation during this period, if we except certain partially Petrarchan poems by Surrey and by Wyatt, and that the poetry written during this interim which is worth remembering belongs to a school in every respect antithetical to the Petrarchist school, a school to which Wyatt and Surrey contributed important efforts, perhaps their best, but which flourished mainly between Surry and Sidney and in a few men who survived or came to maturity somewhat later, a school which laid the groundwork for the greatest achievements in the entire history of the English lyric, which itself left us some of those greatest achievements, and which is almost wholly neglected and forgotten by the anthologists and by the historians of the period, even by the editors, for the greater part, of the individual contributors to the school."
– Yvor Winters ("The 16th Century Lyric in England," 1939)
Philip Taylor said,
March 30, 2022 @ 6:29 am
GH — « I would object that this one in particular needs to be struck. It's a remnant of the parenthetical insertion "during the dangers of the times", and when the comma that leads into that insertion is removed, the trailing one must go as well. A comma in "[they] attempted to trust for their protection, to their own inoffensive conduct" seems to me positively ungrammatical, and I wonder if you are perhaps misreading the sentence meaning to insist on it. Furthermore, "attempted" must qualify "to trust", because otherwise it would be "trusted" ».
Agreed, both counts Odd how a re-cast can seem to make perfect sense at the time of re-casting, yet be patently and obviously wrong when the errors in it are pointed out.
Stephen Hart said,
March 30, 2022 @ 12:58 pm
For sentence length, see David Foster Wallace.
Jerry Packard said,
March 30, 2022 @ 3:52 pm
DFW RIP
Terpomo said,
March 31, 2022 @ 12:39 pm
At one point I attempted to write a one-sentence fantasy novel by starting with a brief summary statement of the plot and iteratively stuffing in sub-clauses. I managed to get as far as about a pageful (in Japanese) before giving up.
Bloix said,
April 1, 2022 @ 9:11 am
David N Evans-
We can all agree, can't we, that this is a bad sentence? That Winters' argument would be more clearly expressed if his points had been set out, in the same sequence and using the same words, in separate sentences?
Here it is in three sentences, all of them still long, but as a whole more intelligible.
"If we can disengage ourselves sufficiently, then, from the preconception that 16th century poetry is essentially Petrarchist, to sift the good poems, regardless of school of method, from the bad, we shall find that the Petrarchist movement produced nothing worth remembering between Skelton and Sidney. In spite of a tremendous amount of Petrarchan experimentation during this period, if we except certain partially Petrarchan poems by Surrey and by Wyatt, the poetry written during this interim which is worth remembering belongs to a school in every respect antithetical to the Petrarchist school, a school to which Wyatt and Surrey contributed important efforts, perhaps their best, but which flourished mainly between Surry and Sidney and in a few men who survived or came to maturity somewhat later. It laid the groundwork for the greatest achievements in the entire history of the English lyric, which itself left us some of those greatest achievements, and which is almost wholly neglected and forgotten by the anthologists and by the historians of the period, even by the editors, for the greater part, of the individual contributors to the school."
Rodger C said,
April 2, 2022 @ 10:14 am
I believe it was Randall Jarrrell who remarked that Yvor Winters wrote as if the last 300 years had happened, but not to him.