Diachronic changes in the grammatical complexity of The Times (1920–2020)
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Fan Pan
Fan Pan is a professor of Applied Linguistics at School of Foreign Languages, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, P.R. China. Her research interest includes corpus linguistics and academic writing.
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Xinyi Zhou
Xinyi Zhou is a PhD student in Applied Linguistics at the School of Foreign Languages, Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Her research interests include corpus linguistics and academic writing.
Abstract
Previous diachronic studies of grammatical complexity have mainly focused on the evolution of complexity features in academic writing, with far less attention paid to the diachronic changes of grammatical complexity in newspapers, a register that has undergone substantial linguistic and sociocultural changes in the past century. The present study explores the diachronic changes of grammatical complexity in newspapers based on a corpus of The Times newspaper texts sampled with twenty-year intervals for 100 years (1920–2020). The results show that phrasal complexity features and mean length of sentence have decreased considerably, while clausal complexity features have seen a marked increase. Our results suggest that newspapers have tended to become less phrasal, more clausal, and more conversational over the past century. Possible explanations for the diachronic changes of grammatical complexity in newspapers over time are offered, in light of the changes in society and journalistic practice.
About the authors
Fan Pan is a professor of Applied Linguistics at School of Foreign Languages, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, P.R. China. Her research interest includes corpus linguistics and academic writing.
Xinyi Zhou is a PhD student in Applied Linguistics at the School of Foreign Languages, Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Her research interests include corpus linguistics and academic writing.
Acknowledgments
We sincerely thank Professor Douglas Biber for tagging our corpus. We are really grateful to the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier versions of this paper.
Appendix A: Diachronic changes in semi-colons in The Times
| 1920 | 1940 | 1960 | 1980 | 2000 | 2020 | r | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Semi-colons | 0.327 | 0.158 | 0.231 | 0.135 | 0.036 | 0.062 | -0.883 |
Appendix B: Composition of newspaper texts sampled from COHA
| 1920 | 1940 | 1960 | 1980 | 2000 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of words | 63,904 | 64,021 | 57,176 | 88,669 | 36,159 |
Appendix C: Diachronic changes of grammatical complexity features in COHA
| Dimensions | Features | Trend | r |
|---|---|---|---|
| Length of production unit | Mean length of sentence | −− | −0.507 |
| Phrasal complexity | Of genitive phrases | −−− | −0.722 |
| Noun + finite relative clauses | −− | −0.517 | |
| Attributive adjectives | −0.166 | ||
| Pre-modifying nouns | +++ | 0.612 | |
| Other postnominal prepositional phrases | −0.193 | ||
| Clausal complexity | Verb + to complement clauses | −− | −0.328 |
| Finite adverbial clauses | +++ | 0.660 | |
| Verb + that complement clauses | 0.040 | ||
| Clause-level adverbs | ++ | 0.461 |
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Key: 0.60 to 0.99 = +++; 0.30 to 0.59 = ++; −0.30 to −0.59 = −−; −0.60 to −0.99 = −−−.
Appendix D: Diachronic changes in colloquial features in The Times
| 1920 | 1940 | 1960 | 1980 | 2000 | 2020 | r | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| First person pronouns | 5.92 | 5.34 | 4.95 | 5.41 | 10.6 | 15 | 0.808 |
| Second person pronouns | 0.75 | 2.14 | 0.96 | 0.73 | 2.83 | 3.21 | 0.684 |
| Contractions | 0.5 | 0.4 | 0.8 | 0.3 | 4.42 | 4.78 | 0.828 |
| That deletion (verb + that) | 1 | 0.7 | 1.1 | 1.4 | 2 | 1.9 | 0.900 |
| Question marks | 0.56 | 0.48 | 0.44 | 0.66 | 1.70 | 2.02 | 0.859 |
| Exclamation marks | 0.08 | 0.17 | 0.11 | 0.03 | 0.21 | 0.15 | 0.321 |
Appendix E: Diachronic changes in direct quotes in The Times
| 1920 | 1940 | 1960 | 1980 | 2000 | 2020 | r | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Direct quotes | 3.346 | 3.145 | 7.570 | 6.691 | 4.241 | 3.749 | 0.126 |
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