Menzerath-Altmann Law in Syntactic Dependency Structure

According to the Menzerath-Altmann law, there is a relation between the size of the whole and the mean size of its parts. The validity of the law was demonstrated on relations between several language units, e.g., the longer a word, the shorter the syllables the word consists of. In this paper it is shown that the law is valid also in syntactic dependency structure in Czech. In particular, longer clauses tend to be composed of shorter phrases (the size of a phrase is measured by the number of words it consists of).

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