I'm only a lowly master's student so I don't have a good hold of all literature, and pragmatics & discourse aren't really my forte, so I think I'd rather refer you to a great resource: the Handbook of Linguistics, editors Aronoff and Rees-Miller. are the product of the same mentality that in ye olde times wanted you not to split infinitives, not to end your sentences with prepositions, and other nonsense up with which you should not put. Like, if I splat that previous sentence into two around "and", would it really be two sentences, or is it really one sentence to begin with?Īll these weird stuff like "don't use active voice" or "use 'simpler' words" etc. But you can have paragraph long sentences that read just buttery smooth, and "sentence" itself is a pretty vague term that you can't really pin down. long-distance dependencies & deictic elements). I'd be more willing to concede if this was talking about the distance of things that refer to each other, or the number of words that refer to previous discourse or outer world (i.e.
Similarly, you can't boil down "complexity" to the length of sentences or number of clauses. There's a variety of approaches here, but you'd be hard pressed to find even a supporter of transformational generative grammar, the Chomskyan paradigm who says active and passive sentences come from the same underlying deep structure (roughly speaking), who'd say active and passive voice sentences are equal or equivalent in discourse. "use" and "utilise" are not at all the same words, one fancy. Linguistics explores these phenomena from many directions, via it's subdisciplines like pragmatics, discourse analysis, semantics, and even syntax.Ī couple well known things the field mostly agrees: there are no real synonyms, in the sense that every word has its own semantic baggage, and that manifests different meanings in different contexts.
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