Abstract
The paper examines the concept of syntactic complexity from the point of view of readability and shows that the factors that make for reading difficulty are several and that some of them remain inaccessible to studies that are based on traditional or generative grammars. The measurement of “Syntactic Depth” is adapted to the interpretive processing direction of the reader and the relevance of relational semantics as well as of the “prospective” ambiguity of phrase structures is demonstrated. Some of the features of an interpretive grammar deemed to be useful in readability studies are illustrated by reference to the correlational grammar developed for the automatic interpretation of English sentences by computer.