Quantitative relationship between distribution of sentence length and dependency distance in Spanish

Jinlu Liu; Nan Yang; Haitao Liu

doi:10.1515/lingvan-2024-0185

Article

Quantitative relationship between distribution of sentence length and dependency distance in Spanish

Jinlu Liu , Nan Yang and Haitao Liu

Published/Copyright: April 18, 2025

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From the journal Linguistics Vanguard Volume 11 Issue 1

Abstract

Sentence length, defined by the number of words contained in a sentence, has always been of great concern in linguistic research. Many studies have been conducted on the distribution of sentence length in specific languages. To further explore the characteristics and patterns of sentence length and their relationship with dependency distance in Spanish, we use the SUD syntactic treebank and conduct a quantitative analysis within the theoretical framework of dependency grammar. It is found that the sentence length distribution of Spanish follows a positive negative binomial model, and there is no significant difference in sentence length distribution among different mean dependency distances (MDDs), but the distribution of the number of sentences in different sentence length intervals follows a normal distribution. In Spanish, sentence length and MDD interact with each other – the longer the sentence is, the greater the MDD is, and vice versa – which is consistent with previous research findings. Also, as sentence length increases in Spanish, short-distance dependencies decrease, but remain within a certain range of fluctuations, which confirms once again that language is a complex and self-adaptive system driven by humans.

Keywords: Spanish; sentence length; sentence length distribution; dependency distance; short-distance dependency relationship

Corresponding author: Haitao Liu, College of Foreign Languages and Literature, Fudan University, No. 220 Handan Road, Shanghai, 200433, China, E-mail: htliu@163.com

Funding source: Graduate Research Training Program of Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics

Award Identifier / Grant number: 23XJKT062

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank for the editors and anonymous reviewers for their insightful and valuable comments on our present paper.

Research funding: This work is supported by the Postgraduate Training Program (PRTP) of Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics (23XJKT062).

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Received: 2024-09-24

Accepted: 2025-03-21

Published Online: 2025-04-18

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2024-0185

Keywords for this article

Spanish; sentence length; sentence length distribution; dependency distance; short-distance dependency relationship