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Parataxis and hypotaxis in historical corpora

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2026

George Walkden
George Walkden*
Affiliation:
University of Konstanz
*
University of Konstanz, Universitätsstraße 10, 78464 Konstanz, Germany, [george.walkden@gmail.com]
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Abstract

A recurring narrative in studies of syntactic change is that hypotaxis gains ground at the expense of parataxis. This report shows that this claim—if construed as a quantitative claim about the frequency of different types of clause combining—finds little support in parsed diachronic corpora of seven languages. Genre appears to be a factor that substantially influences the proportion of hypotaxis found in a text in consistent ways, but time does not.

Keywords

hypotaxisparataxisparsed corporasyntactic change

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Type
Research Report
Information
Language , Volume 101 , Issue 4 , December 2025 , pp. e343 - e368
Copyright
Copyright © 2025 Linguistic Society of America

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