Abstract
ABSTRACT The study justifies phrases (instead of words) as the direct constituents of clauses using English academic research articles (RAs) by fitting the Menzerath-Altmann Law (MAL) to the correlations between sentence length (in clause numbers) and clause length (in phrase numbers), and between clause length and phrase length (in word numbers). The study was conducted under the framework of dependency grammar, with a self-built corpus of 104,499 tokens. The results indicate that 1) both correlations abide by the MAL, or abide when excluding the second MAL regime, regardless of part-genres, suggesting that phrases are the appropriate direct constituents of clauses. 2) The increasing MAL fitting curve is found in , which has the shortest mean dependency distance. 3) Clustering analysis on the MAL parameters in dependency structure can effectively differentiate the size-restricted from the other part-genres at the lower level, i.e., clause-phrase-word level. Furthermore, our findings have important implications: 1) The second regime may be closely related to text characteristics or linguistic unit levels. 2) The dependency distance minimization effect is possibly a counteractive force against the Menzerathian shortening effect. 3) The competing relationship between clausal and phrasal complexity in RAs is driven by the self-regulating and self-adapting language system.
Published Version
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