Menzerath-Altmann law; syntax; dependency structure

According to the Menzerath-Altmann law,there is a relation between the size of thewhole and the mean size of its parts. The validityof the law was demonstrated on relationsbetween several language units, e.g.,the longer a word, the shorter the syllablesthe word consists of. In this paper it is shownthat the law is valid also in syntactic dependencystructure in Czech. In particular, longerclauses tend to be composed of shorterphrases (the size of a phrase is measured bythe number of words it consists of).