Complexification as a metric of diachronic text-type characterisation

Zusammenfassung

This investigation is couched in a larger project on the degree of variation experienced by the English language in its recent history as far as the syntactic complexity of clausal constituents is concerned. A standard corpus of Modern and Contemporary (British) English (ARCHER) provides the empirical data on different text types, which will be analysed according to the syntactic organisation of their declarative sentences. More specifically, this paper concentrates on the internal structure of the categories fulfilling the function subject in the periods just mentioned, with special reference to two text types, namely news (written-to-be-read and written-to-be-spoken texts) and letters (informal "(possibly) speech-based" textual material). In a nutshell, complexity is here interpreted as a theoretical concept derived from both syntactic expansion and phrase-marker configuration, in which the size, the weight and the "depth" of the constituents under examination play a significant role.