Paper by Guido Linders and Stefan Schnell on "A cross-linguistic computational study on one new idea per clause"

In this paper, part of a special issue of Functions of Language on Wallace Chafe's One New Idea at a time, we investigate whether clauses only contain one new idea at a time in discourse production data from 16 diverse languages. We find no convincing evidence for a hard constraint on the number of new ideas per clause, nor for speakers actively managing information flow in discourse.

Linders, G. M., & Schnell, S. (2026). A cross-linguistic computational study on one new idea per clause. Functions of Language, 33(1–2), 159–191. https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.26016.rei