Syntactic units; length distributions; dependency syntax

This study investigates the length distributions of syntactic units in Czech across multiple hierarchical levels: sentences, independent clauses, clauses, phrases, subphrases, and chunks. Using a diverse dataset – including Universal Dependency treebanks, presidential speeches, the Czech Bible, and random sample from corpora of modern Czech – the analysis examines whether lengths of these syntactic units follow consistent distributional patterns. Length is defined as the number of immediate subunits, and the distributions were modeled using the hyper-Poisson distribution. The results demonstrate that the hyper-Poisson model fits well distributions of length of all abovementioned syntactic units, pointing to a common principle underlying the organization of syntactic structure in Czech.

This study investigates the length distributions of syntactic units in Czech across multiple hierarchical levels: sentences, independent clauses, clauses, phrases, subphrases, and chunks. Using a diverse dataset – including Universal Dependency treebanks, presidential speeches, the Czech Bible, and random sample from corpora of modern Czech – the analysis examines whether lengths of these syntactic units follow consistent distributional patterns. Length is defined as the number of immediate subunits, and the distributions were modeled using the hyper-Poisson distribution. The results demonstrate that the hyper-Poisson model fits well distributions of length of all abovementioned syntactic units, pointing to a common principle underlying the organization of syntactic structure in Czech.