II. — On the Decrease of Predication and of Sentence Weight 

 in English Prose. 



By G. W. GERWIG. 



In a recent paper printed in these Studies., "On Certain 

 Facts and Principles in the Development of Form in Litera- 

 ture" (Vol. I, No. 4), Professor Sherman has given the method 

 and results of his investigation into English sentence length. 

 This article is a continuation of that work. As was there 

 noted, the English sentence has gone through a period of co- 

 ordination, of subordination, and of suppression of clauses. 

 Professor Sherman found that the sentences of modern writers 

 are approximately fifty per cent lighter in structure than of 

 authors like Chaucer, Ascham, and Lyly, He noted that the 

 early writers habitually put a number of predications in each 

 period, while writers of our day use but few. He noted also 

 that recent writers employ a great many sentences containing 

 but a single predication, while in the earliest prose a simple 

 sentence rarely occurs. At Professor Sherman's suggestion I 

 undertook to discover whether there was any consistent devel- 

 opment, either in the average number of predications per 

 sentence in various authors, or in the percentage of simple 

 sentences used by each. 



A very little investigation served to convince me that the 

 same remarkable uniformity which had been found in the av- 

 erage number of words used by any given author per sentence 

 would also hold in regard to the number of finite verbs, or 

 predications, found in each sentence. The results obtained 

 convinced me also that there was a uniformity in the number 

 of simple sentences per hundred of a given author. Every 

 full stop, marked by the use of a period, an interrogation poiat, 

 or an exclamation point, followed by a capital letter, was taken 

 a,8 the limit of a period, and the number of finite-verb forms in it, 



University Studies, Vol. H, No. 1, July, 1894 



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