Yet, all things considered, she was not of an evil mind or an unkindly disposition.
No content distinction will be needed that does not find its own mark at the level of expression. One way dependency relations (hypotaxis) will not suffice. In the vein of Jespersen and Hjelmslev I shall employ two way dependency relations as well (nexus or catataxis). The relations between subject, finite verb and object are the aim of our analysis and simple enough to serve as our example, too.
Dependency relations can be seen as abstract relations of governance between syntactic categories, […] . Viewed at the level of abstract categorial dependency or governance, the relation between subject and finite verb is catataxis, the relation between finite verb and direct object is hypotaxis:
(4) Subject ↔ Verb → Object
The Prior at length […] rode off with considerably less pomp, and in a much more apostolical condition, so far as worldly matters were concerned, than he had exhibited before this rencounter.
Thus, throughout the nineteenth century, linguists generally held that more grammatically complex languages were older and that languages tended to simplify over time—the four grammatical cases of German as contrasted with the seven of Latin, for example.
