clause length, negation, Menzerath-Altmann law

According to the Menzerath-Altmann law, the mean word length isgreater in shorter clauses than in longer ones. In Czech, negation is mostly realized by adding the prefix ne- to the beginning of the word, which makes theword longer (and, consequently, it also increases the mean word length in theclause). Therefore, we predict that clauses in which the predicate is in the affirmative form are longer than ones with the negative predicate. We test the hypothesis on a sample of 59 pairs of affirmative and negative forms of the sameverb from the Prague Dependency Treebank 3.0.