Longest English sentence

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There have been several claims for the longest sentence in the English language.

There is no absolute limit on the length of an English sentence. A sentence describing successive numbers, for example, could stretch to infinity, and one concatenating clauses with grammatical conjunctions such as and could go on as long as material may be supplied. Thus, at least one linguistics textbook concludes that "there is no longest English sentence".^[1] Another way to extend sentences indefinitely is by the addition of modifiers and modifier clauses, such as

The rat that the cat that the dog chased saw ran.^[2]

or of successive extensions of the form

Someone thinks/knows/believes that someone thinks/knows/believes that....^[3]

This highlights the difference between linguistic performance and linguistic competence, because the language can support more variation than can reasonably be created or recorded.^[3]

As for published work, it is an open matter as to what should be considered an admissable sentence. Joyce's entries listed below could have been much shortened by the addition of a few full stops, with arguably little effect.

[edit] Contenders

1,287 words - The Guinness Book of World Records has an entry for what it claims is the longest sentence in English, from William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! containing 1,287 words.
12,931 - The last section of James Joyce's Ulysses, Molly Bloom's soliloquy, includes two sentences, the first one 11,281 words long, the second 12,931 words long.
13,955 - In 2001 Jonathan Coe had a 13,955-word sentence in his novel, The Rotters' Club.^[4]
469,375 - The Blah Story, Volume 4 by Nigel Tomm consists of one sentence which contains 469,375 words or 2,273,551 characters (with spaces) ^[5]^[6].
510,000 - Mark Leach’s Marienbad My Love, marketed as the world’s longest published novel in English, features a sentence that contains about 510,000 words – about 5 percent of the 10.1 million-word book.^[7]