分析近现代英语句长变化，发现其与语法结构演变相关。
Variation of sentence length across time and genre
- 用历史语料库分析句长随时间与文体的变化趋势
- 证实句长呈下降趋势，且与'in order to'使用频率降低有关
- 适合语言学研究者及历史语言演变爱好者
本文旨在三方面：一、展示使用最大历时多体裁英语语料库COHA全文版本进行语言趋势研究的实际方法；二、检验一个广泛假设，即书面英语句长在过去几个世纪持续缩短；三、指出句长变化可能与英语句法使用变化存在关联。通过非限定目的从属连词'in order to'使用频率下降，提供了该假设的实证支持。句长、文体与'in order to'出现概率被证明相互关联。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The goal of this paper is threefold: i) to present some practical aspects of using full-text version of Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), the largest diachronic multi-genre corpus of the English language, in the investigation of a linguistic trend of change; ii) to test a widely held assumption that sentence length in written English has been steadily decreasing over the past few centuries; iii) to point to a possible link between the changes in sentence length and changes in the English syntactic usage. The empirical proof of concept for iii) is provided by the decline in the frequency of the non-finite purpose subordinator in order to. Sentence length, genre and the likelihood of occurrence of in order to are shown to be interrelated.
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