Introduction

Abstract

The most complex inventions of syntacticians are sometimes no match for sentences that occur naturally. Numerous examples of the following kind can be found in the British National Corpus:

Consequently, the answer to be given to the national court must be that the fact that the competent minister of a member state has the power to dispense with the nationality requirement in respect of an individual in view of the length of time such individual has resided in that member state and has been involved in the fishing industry of that member state cannot justify, in regard to Community law, the rule under which registration of a fishing vessel is subject to a nationality requirement and a requirement as to residence and domicile (The Weekly Law Reports, 1992 in the British National Corpus).

Legalese is, of course, notoriously convoluted. Nevertheless, its convolutions lie completely within the syntactic possibilities of the English language. Judging from the many examples found in the British National Corpus and other sources, syntactic complexity is not confined to the legal domain. Here is another, less complex example:

THAT variation in word order does indeed indicate different information structure can be seen from the ‘fact’ that, even though different variations might be equally well-formed, they are not necessarily equally interchangeable in a given context (Kruijff, 2002, writing to the electronic discussion group Corpora).