Longest English sentence

There have been several claims for the longest sentence in the English language, usually with claims that revolve around the longest printed sentence, because there is no limit on the possible length of a written English sentence.

At least one linguistics textbook concludes that, in theory, "there is no longest English sentence."[1] A sentence can be made arbitrarily long by successive iterations, such as "Someone thinks that someone thinks that someone thinks that...,"[2] or by combining shorter clauses in various ways.

For example, sentences can be extended by recursively embedding clauses one into another, such as [3][4]

"The mouse ran away"
"The mouse that the cat hit ran away"
...
"The mouse that the cat that the dog that the man frightened and chased ran away"

The ability to embed structures within larger ones is called recursion.[5] This also highlights the difference between linguistic performance and linguistic competence, because the language can support more variation than can reasonably be created or recorded.[2]

Exceptionally long sentences in print
  • A sentence often claimed to be the longest sentence ever written is in Molly Bloom's soliloquy in the James Joyce novel Ulysses (1922), which contains a "sentence" of 3,687 words.[6]
  • One of the longest sentences in American literature is in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936). The sentence is composed of 1,288 words (in the 1951 Random House version).[6]
  • Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann, a finalist for the 2019 Booker Prize, runs more than a thousand pages, mostly consisting of a single sentence that is 426,100 words long, appearing to hold the record for longest sentence. [8]
gollark: I will devour your soul for this.
gollark: Wait, was it YOU spamming incidents?
gollark: My logs are unpolluted again.
gollark: Protocol Sigma-84 has been completed successfully.
gollark: I may need to initiate Contingency Sigma-84.

See also

References
  1. Steven E. Weisler; Slavoljub P. Milekic; Slavko Milekic (2000). Theory of Language. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-73125-6.
  2. Stephen Crain; Diane Lillo-Martin (1999). An Introduction to Linguistic Theory and Language Acquisition. Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 978-0-631-19536-8.
  3. Christiansen, Morten H.; Chater, Nick (1999). "Toward a Connectionist Model of Recursion in Human Linguistic Performance". Cognitive Science. 23 (2): 157–205. doi:10.1207/s15516709cog2302_2.
  4. Thomas R. Shultz (2003). Computational Developmental Psychology. p. 236. ISBN 9780132288064.
  5. Carnie, Andrew (2013). Syntax: A Generative Introduction (third ed.). Singapore: Wiley-Blackwell. p. 33. ISBN 978-0-470-65531-3.
  6. Jones, Rebecca (3 October 2014). "Longest Sentence". Today. BBC. Retrieved 12 February 2015.
  7. Publishers Weekly: "Solar Bones"
  8. Quartz: "One of this year’s Booker Prize nominees is just a 1,000-page-long sentence" 26 July, 2019
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