Longest English sentence

There have been several claims for the longest sentence in the English language, usually with claims that revolve around the longest printed sentence. There is no absolute limit on the length of a written English sentence. A sentence can be made as long as time allows with concatenating (linking) clauses using grammatical conjunctions such as . Sentences can also be extended indefinitely by the addition of modifiers and modifier clauses, such as:

or of successive extensions of the form

One of the longest sentences in literature is contained in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936). The sentence is composed of 1,288 words (In the 1951 Random House version). Another sentence that is often claimed to be the longest sentence ever written is Molly Bloom's soliloquy in the James Joyce novel Ulysses (1922), which contains a sentence of 3,687 words. However, this sentence is simply many sentences without punctuation. Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club appears to hold the record at 13,955 words. It was inspired by Bohumil Hrabal's Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age: a Czech language novel written in one long sentence.

The ability to embed structures within larger ones is called recursion. This also highlights the difference between linguistic performance and linguistic competence, because the language can support more variation than can reasonably be created or recorded. At least one linguistics textbook concludes that, in theory, "there is no longest English sentence".

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