The goal of this paper is threefold: (i) to present some practical aspects of using the full-text version of the
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 changes in sentence length and changes in 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.
Article outline
1.Introduction
2.Sentence length in written English: The diachronic evolution across genres
2.1Just a matter of punctuation conventions?
3.A comprehensive analysis of sentence length in the time period of 1800–2000
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