An Investigation on the Frequency of Use of Written English Complex Sentences Based on Syntactic Annotation Corpora
Complex sentence is a complicated sentence type in human language.Because of the complexity of its sentence structure and the diversity of types of subordinate clauses,it has always been the focus of academic research.We used Brown and LOB corpus to quantitatively explore the frequency of English complex sentences from four dimensions:overall frequency,genre,language variety,and the number and types of subordinate clauses contained in complex sentences.The results show that:genre significantly affects the frequency of complex sentences,which is the highest in religion,literature,biography and prose,and the lowest in novels,which may be related to the seriousness or formality of text;the differences of language varieties have no significant difference in the frequency of complex sentences;the number and type of subordinate clauses have a significant impact on the frequency of complex sentences.Whether American English or British English,the frequency of complex sentences with relational clauses is not the lowest,which is contrary to the previous relevant research conclusion.
Brown and LOB corpusEnglish complex sentencefrequency of usegenrelanguage variety