scholarly journals Sætningskompleksitet i dansk

2021 ◽  
pp. 85-99
Author(s):  
Mads Christiansen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Complexity Reduction ◽  
Linguistic Complexity ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Similar Development

This article gives an introduction to linguistic complexity and investigates the complexity of sentences in Danish from a diachronic perspective. By taking a recursion-based approach to the phenomenon, it can be shown that in the old part of the corpus (eighteenth/ nineteenth century) sentences are more complex than in the new part (twentieth/twentyfirst century). For instance, the older texts are found to contain more clauses per sentence, more clause complexes and more subordinate clauses of a higher degree of dependency than the contemporary texts. The observation that a similar development occurs in Swedish and German should be considered when trying to explain the process of complexity reduction.

scholarly journals Relative Absoluteness: The Case of Participial Clauses in Latin

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-99
Author(s):  
Beata Spieralska ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Spoken Language ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Gallic Wars ◽  
Similar Development

The aim of this article is to reopen the investigation of the ablative absolute in Latin and to analyse this construction and its use from one angle, namely, the coreferentiality rules. The examples for analysis have been taken from the Gallic Wars. As has been noticed before, in several works, the use of the absolute construction in texts written by classical authors, such as Caesar or Cicero, allows us to formulate a rule concerning its coreferentiality. As far as the syntactical coreferentiality is concerned, the classical rule requires an absolute construction to be — unsurprisingly — absolute, i. e., non-coreferential. This rule seems to be increasingly ignored by later authors. However, a deeper analysis taking into account not only syntactical but also semantical coreferentiality shows that the absoluteness of the construction is not so absolute after all, even in classical Latin. The examples of such use of the ablativus absolutus may be seen as forerunners of the change that occurred between classical and late Latin. The author proposes a hypothesis that an independent but similar development of the use of absolute constructions in different languages may suggest that there is a kind of interlinguistic tendency to substitute nominal phrases for subordinate clauses, especially in spoken language.

Rivalling Noun-Dependent Complements in Modern English: that‑Clauses and ‘Complex’ Gerunds

2019 ◽  
Vol 137 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Günter Rohdenburg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Present Status ◽  
American English ◽  
General Assumption ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Structural Discontinuity ◽  
Different Types

Abstract This corpus‑based paper explores the history and present status of the contrast between noun‑dependent that‑clauses and ‘complex’ gerunds containing their own subjects. With seven of the fifteen nouns under scrutiny, the emergence of the that‑clause either follows that of the gerund or the two complement types emerge at about the same time. This suggests that we will have to qualify the general assumption that since the eighteenth century English has promoted non‑finite subordinate clauses at the expense of finite ones. More crucially, with by far most of the nouns investigated, the that‑clause has gained much further ground over the last few centuries, with American English spearheading this development since the early nineteenth century. In line with the Complexity Principle, the grammatical environments favouring the more explicit that‑clause over the complex gerund include subject complexity and different types of structural discontinuity. Intriguingly, however, the easy‑to‑process there‑clause containing the nouns in question is also found to favour the that‑clause at the expense of the complex gerund.

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