Longest English sentence

Longest English sentence

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 could go on as long as material may be supplied. Thus, at least one linguistics textbook concludes that "there is no longest English sentence". [cite book
url=http://books.google.com/books?id=wIaGLUFHtxsC
title=Theory of Language
author=Steven E. Weisler, Slavoljub P. Milekic, Slavko Milekic
year=2000
publisher=MIT Press
isbn=0262731258] 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 saw ran."cite book
url=http://books.google.com/books?id=lIuu53IcKWoC
title=Automata, Computability and Complexity: Theory and Applications
author=Elaine Rich
year=2007
publisher=Pearson Prentice Hall
isbn=0132288060] or of successive extensions of the form :"Someone thinks/knows/believes that someone thinks/knows/believes that...."cite book
url=http://books.google.com/books?id=NgBBKuYrV2wC
title=An Introduction to Linguistic Theory and Language Acquisition
author=Stephen Crain, Diane Lillo-Martin
year=1999
publisher=Blackwell Publishing
isbn=063119536X] This highlights the difference between linguistic performance and linguistic competence, because the language can support more variation than can reasonably be created or recorded.

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.

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, includes two sentences, the first one 11,281 words long, the second 12,931 words long.
* 13,955 - In 2001 Jonathan Coe had a 13,955-word sentence in his novel, "The Rotters' Club". [citation|url=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/05/22/boll.xml|title=Literary life|date=29/05/2005|publisher=Daily Telegraph]
* 2,403,109 - "The Blah Story, Volume 16", "17", "18" and "19" by Nigel Tomm consist of one sentence which contains 2,403,109 words or 15,403,732 characters (with spaces); "The Blah Story, Volume 4" by Nigel Tomm consists of one sentence which contains 469,375 words or 2,273,551 characters (with spaces) [cite web|url=http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/6/prweb1008804.htm|title=The Longest Sentence Contains the Longest Word] [cite web|url=http://www.amazon.com/Blah-Story-19-Nigel-Tomm/dp/1438234554/|title=The Blah Story, Volume 19] [cite web|url=http://www.amazon.com/Blah-Story-4-Nigel-Tomm/dp/1419683047/|title=The Blah Story, Volume 4] .
* 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. [cite web|url=http://www.marienbadmylove.com|title=The World's Longest Published Novel in English] [cite web|url=http://www.prlog.org/10086581-worlds-longest-novel-keeps-getting-longer.html
title=World's Longest Novel Keeps Getting Longer]

Notes

External links and references

* [http://gavroche.org/vhugo/sentence.shtml More info on long sentences]


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