It’s easy to perceive clear historical trends in sentence length and the depth of clausal embedding in published English text. And those perceptions can easily be verified quantitatively. Or can they? The answer depends on several prior questions: What is a sentence? What is the boundary between syntactic structure and discourse structure? How is message structure encoded in speech versus in text? This presentation will survey the issues, look at data, and suggest some answers – or at least some fruitful directions for future work.

Mark Liberman (University of Pennsylvania) is Christopher H. Browne Professor of Linguistics, and also a professor in Computer and Information Sciences. His recent work has focused on corpus-based methods, with applications to legal, medical, educational, and political analysis and linguistic theory. He is the founder and director of the Linguistic Data Consortium, and co-editor of the Annual Review of Linguistics.

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