Sentence (linguistics) - Sentence Length

Sentence Length

After a slump of interest, sentence length came to be studied in the 1980s, mostly "with respect to other syntactic phenomena".

By some definitions, the average size length of a sentence is given by "no. of words / no. of sentences". The textbook Mathematical linguistics, written by András Kornaiin suggests that in "journalistic prose the median sentence length is above 15 words". The average length of a sentence generally serves as a measure of sentence difficulty or complexity. The general trend is that as the average sentence length increases, the complexity of the sentences also increases.

In some circumstances "sentence length" is expressed by the number of clauses, while the "clause length" is expressed by the number of phones.

D. L. Olmsted points out that the length of a sentence, even without any testing, can arbitrarily reach a maximum, because " sentence length of less than a million words".

A test done by Erik Schils and Pieter de Haan (by sampling five texts) showed that any two adjacent sentences are more likely to have similar lengths, and almost certainly have similar length when from a text in the fiction genre. This countered the theory that "authors may aim at an alternation of long and short sentence". Sentence length, as well as word difficulty, are both factors in the readability of a sentence. However, other factors, such as the presence of conjunctions, have been said to "facilitate comprehension considerably".