ABSTRACT
Sentence length One obvious way is to vary the length of sentences-and here I am talking in terms of numbers of clauses per sentence, so this will usually mean varying sentence structure rather than pure length. Crude figures may convey something. There are 646 sentences in the narrative, divided up as follows (Table 1):
Table 1 No. of clauses per sentence
I-clause 2-clause 3-clause 4-clause 5-clause 6-clause 7-clause 8-clause 9-clause IO-clause
It says something about the skill of the story-teller that only two sentences are broken off indicating that he changed his mind about what to say next. There is no stumbling, recapitulation, or muddling of the narrative. In fact it does get compressed towards the end as he realises that time is running out, but that does not affect the construction of his sentences. Not all storytellers are thus fluent.
