There have been several claims for the longest sentence in the English language.
There is no absolute limit on the length of an English sentence. A sentence describing successive numbers, for example, could stretch to infinity, and one concatenating clauses with grammatical conjunctions such as and could go on as long as material may be supplied. Thus, at least one linguistics textbook concludes that "there is no longest English sentence".[1] Another way to extend sentences indefinitely is by the addition of modifiers and modifier clauses, such as
- The rat that the cat that the dog chased ran.[2]
or of successive extensions of the form
- Someone thinks/knows/believes that someone thinks/knows/believes that....[3]
This highlights the difference between linguistic performance and linguistic competence, because the language can support more variation than can reasonably be created or recorded.[3]
As for published work, it is an open matter as to what should be considered an admissible sentence. Joyce's entries listed below could have been much shortened by the addition of a few full stops, with arguably little effect.
Contents |
Contenders
- 1,287 words - The Guinness Book of World Records has an entry for what it claims is the longest sentence in English, from William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! containing 1,287 words.
- 12,931 - The last section of James Joyce's Ulysses, Molly Bloom's soliloquy, consists of two sentences. The first one is 11,281 words long, and the second is 12,931 words long.
- 13,955 - In 2001 Jonathan Coe had a 13,955-word sentence in his novel, The Rotters' Club.[4]
- 2,403,109 - A single sentence spans Volumes 16, 17, 18 and 19 of Nigel Tomm's absurdist work The Blah Story. [5]. Most of this sentence consists of repetitions of the word "blah". Volume 19 consists mostly of a single 3,609,750-letter word, itself an agglutination of many previously known long words.
- 3,000,000 - Mark Leach’s Marienbad My Love, marketed as the world’s longest published novel in English, features a sentence that contains about 3 million words of the 17 million-word book.[6][7]
See also
Notes
- ^ Steven E. Weisler, Slavoljub P. Milekic, Slavko Milekic (2000). Theory of Language. MIT Press. ISBN 0262731258. http://books.google.com/books?id=wIaGLUFHtxsC.
- ^ Elaine Rich (2007). Automata, Computability and Complexity: Theory and Applications. Pearson Prentice Hall. ISBN 0132288060. http://books.google.com/books?id=lIuu53IcKWoC.
- ^ a b Stephen Crain, Diane Lillo-Martin (1999). An Introduction to Linguistic Theory and Language Acquisition. Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 063119536X. http://books.google.com/books?id=NgBBKuYrV2wC.
- ^ "Literary life". Daily Telegraph. 2005-05-29. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/05/22/boll.xml.
- ^ "The Longest Sentence Contains the Longest Word". http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/6/prweb1008804.htm.
- ^ "The World's Longest Published Novel in English". http://www.marienbadmylove.com.
- ^ "World's Longest Novel Keeps Getting Longer". http://www.prlog.org/10086581-worlds-longest-novel-keeps-getting-longer.html.
External links and references
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