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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton 2023

Why does negation of the predicate shorten a clause?

From the book Quantitative Approaches to Universality and Individuality in Language

  • Radek Čech , Barbora Benešová and Ján Mačutek

Abstract

According to the Menzerath-Altmann law, the mean word length is greater 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 the word longer (and, consequently, it also increases the mean word length in the clause). 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 same verb from the Prague Dependency Treebank 3.0.

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