Get the latest tech news
The rise and fall of the English sentence (2017)
The surprising forces influencing the complexity of the language we speak and write.
But eye-tracking studies show that when we read, we break free of linear time and seize control over the flow of information, our eye movements lurching along at inconsistent speeds and frequently jumping back to earlier parts of a sentence which, during speech, would already be auditory vapor. For example, psychologist Jessica Montag and her colleagues targeted relative clauses in the passive voice ( the dog that was hit by the car), which are exceedingly rare in speech but more abundant in text, even that written for children. And writing stretches the distance between participants even wider, allowing writers to communicate with unseen readers across expanses of time and space, thus amplifying the pressures that drive exoteric languages to syntactic complexity.
Or read this on Hacker News
