A Quantitative Study of Syntactic Complexity across Genres: Dependency Distance in E nglish and C hinese (2025)

Abstract: This study investigates syntactic complexity in fiction and news genres by analyzing mean dependency distances (MDD) across controlled sentence lengths in English and Chinese corpora. Results show that English fiction exhibits greater MDD than news, while Chinese fiction shows the reverse. More complex syntactic structures, i.e., complex coordination structures, are found in English fiction texts than in news writing. In contrast, Chinese news writing relies more on nominal modification and prepositional phrases that create long-distance dependencies than fiction texts. These findings show deviations from uniform correlations between genre formality and syntactic complexity across languages.

## introduction syntactic complexity of genres has been given explicit attention in the field of quantitative syntax @xcite . measurements, such as dependency distance and sentence length, have been employed to compare genres' syntactic difficulty @xcite @xcite . dependency distance, based on the concept of dependency grammar which describes the asymmetric syntactic relationship between two words concerned, refers to the linear distance between the governor and the dependent @xcite . for example, in the pair (cat, chased) in figure 1 , chased is the governor and cat the dependent, the type shown as the label above the arc is nsubj (nominal subject). the dependency distance of this pair is |3 -4| = 1. the notion of dependency distance signals the difficulty level of a given sentence. the greater the dependency distance, the more difficult the syntactic analysis of a sentence is @xcite . recent advances in quantitative dependency syntax @xcite have established more complicated frameworks for cross-linguistic analysis. these developments raise further questions about how dependency distance interacts with genre characteristics. formal genres, such as informative texts, are presumably expected to have greater syntactic complexity, shown as the longer sentences and greater dependency distances. however, as investigated by @xcite , when sentence lengths are controlled, imaginative texts show greater dependency distances, which indicates more complex syntactic structures than do informative texts. they did not further conduct the statistical analysis of the descriptive statistics though, thus leaving questions regarding statistical significance unresolved. more recently, chen & kubát (2024) found that short stories in czech national corpus have greater dependency distances than newspapers, to some extent challenging the assumption that more formal texts ## methods and materials texts in the english corpus were collected from flob corpus. flob (freiburg-lob corpus of british english) is a british written english corpus, mainly including 15 genres. this paper extracted three types of news and three types of fiction genres, specifically including press reportage (a), press editorials (b), press review (c), general fiction (k), mystery and detective fiction (l), and humor (r). ten texts are collected from each genre (except for humor fiction, which only has 9 texts in the corpus), resulting in a total of 59 english texts. to ease english-chinese register comparison, the chinese corpus in this paper uses the lancaster corpus of mandarin chinese (lcmc), which was designed as a chinese counterpart to the flob corpus following similar sampling principles and genre categories. consistent with the english selection, this paper selected six chinese genres-a, b, c, k, l, and rcomprising three news registers and three fiction registers, for a total of 59 chinese texts. according to the previous experience @xcite , the sentences from each text were grouped by length ranges from 1-5 words, 6-10 words, etc., as shown in here n is the total number of words, s is the total number of sentences and dd i is the dd of the i-th syntactic link of the sample. when the dependency type was investigated, two features, i.e., their dependency distances and frequencies were considered. the present study quantified those two factors by calculating the relative contribution of mdds of each dependency type. here is the formula for calculating relative contribution of each dependency type: ## conclusion overall, the current research shows that metrics such as dependency distance can capture genresensitive patterns of syntactic complexity, but their interpretation is better understood in the context of both cross-linguistic variation and genre-specific conventions. these insights may shed a new light on genre analysis and highlight the value of quantitative syntax in uncovering structural differences across languages. future work could broaden this investigation by combining a wider range of genres and additional typologically diverse languages to further assess the cross-linguistic and cross-genre consistency of these findings.