Menzerath-Altmann Law for Syntactic Structures in Ukrainian

In the general form, such a dependence can be formulated as follows: the longer is the construct the shorter are its constituents. Later on, this fact was put in a mathematical form by Gabriel Altmann [1]. Now it is known as the Menzerath-Altmann law and is considered to be one of the general linguistic laws with evidences reaching far beyond the linguistic domain itself [2]. The mentioned relationship is studied on various levels of language units, such as syllable-word, morpheme-word, etc. While the word-sentence seems to be the most straightforward generalization on the syntactic level, it appears that in fact an intermediate unit must be introduced in this scheme [3, p. 283]. Usually, this intermediate unit are thought to be phrases or clauses, which are direct constituents of the sentence [4]. We would like to note, however, that the notion of clause is not well elaborated in Eastern European linguistic traditions [5], including Ukrainian (cf.