Diachronic changes in the grammatical complexity of The Times (1920–2020)

Abstract Previous diachronic studies of grammatical complexity have mainly focused on the evolution of complexity features in academic writing, with far less attention paid to the diachronic changes of grammatical complexity in newspapers, a register that has undergone substantial linguistic and sociocultural changes in the past century. The present study explores the diachronic changes of grammatical complexity in newspapers based on a corpus of The Times newspaper texts sampled with twenty-year intervals for 100 years (1920–2020). The results show that phrasal complexity features and mean length of sentence have decreased considerably, while clausal complexity features have seen a marked increase. Our results suggest that newspapers have tended to become less phrasal, more clausal, and more conversational over the past century. Possible explanations for the diachronic changes of grammatical complexity in newspapers over time are offered, in light of the changes in society and journalistic practice.