@inproceedings{krielke-etal-2025-tracing,
    title = "Tracing Syntactic Complexity: Exploring the Evolution of Average Dependency Length Across Three Centuries of Scientific {E}nglish",
    author = "Krielke, Marie-Pauline  and
      Alves, Diego  and
      Talamo, Luigi",
    editor = "Haji{\v{c}}ov{\'a}, Eva  and
      Kahane, Sylvain",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling, SyntaxFest 2025)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Ljubljana, Slovenia",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/transition-to-people-yaml/2025.depling-1.2/",
    pages = "13--23",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-290-9",
    abstract = "We present a diachronic analysis of syntactic change in a corpus covering over 300 years (1665{--}1996) of scientific English, annotated with Universal Dependencies (UD) and Dependency Length (DL). We trace the development of average Dependency Length (aDL) as a measure of syntactic complexity in scientific English between 1665 and 1996. We describe the construction of the corpus and report on the evaluation of the UD annotation. We find that aDL initially decreases toward the 19th century, but then increases significantly in the 20th century. We show that this highly aggregate measure of aDL masks the underlying mechanisms driving changes in syntactic complexity. A more fine-grained analysis of the dependency relations involved in these changes reveals that the increasing use of (multi-word) compounds is a dominant source of long, leftward-expanded noun phrases. This leads to an expansion of syntactic dependencies both within and beyond the noun phrase. The results offer a new perspective on syntactic complexity, shifting the focus from the sentence level to the phrasal level."
}