Long sentences, long words – short sentences, long words? Typological Studies on Menzerath’s law

Abstract In recent studies on the relationship between linguistic units of different levels (e.g., word and sentence length) it has turned out that it is extremly important to distin-guish intra-textual from inter-textual approaches: whereas in an inter-textual perspective, there seems to be only weak evidence in coincidence with well-known linguistic regulari-ties, intra-textually oriented studies prove to be relevant, among others, for purposes of text classification (cf. Grzybek and Stadlober 2006). Short sentences, however, seem to represent exceptions to rule, in so far as they do not follow the general tendency described by the Menzerath law, saying that an increase in sen-tence length goes along with an increase in word length. The present study is a detailed analysis of this phenomenon and tries to find out, if we are concerned with language specific, text typological of other factors