Tristram Shandy/Additive

The first oral quality within Tristram Shandy is its tendency to structure sentences additively rather than subordinatively. Ong describes ‘additive’ as a series of words such as ‘and’, ‘when’, ‘then’, etc., saying, “Written discourse develops more elaborate and fixed grammar than oral discourse does because to provide meaning it is more dependent simply upon linguistic structure” (Ong, 38). Sterne does not use words to provide addition, but actually omits any kind of conjunction that is not purely stylistic. In fact, the entire first page of Book 1, Chapter 1, is one sentence—interrupted only by dashes, semi-colons and commas; there are two sentences within the whole first chapter.