Abstract This study investigates the interrelationship between syntactic complexity as measured by dependency distance (DD) and clause length (specifically those less than ten characters) in Chinese Hua’er folk songs. The findings demonstrate that the right truncated modified Zipf–Alekseev model effectively describes the inverse relationship between DDs and clause lengths. An examination of the internal self-organization mechanism of the Hua’er system reveals that as sentence length increases, the mean dependency distance (MDD) decreases. This observation provides novel evidence for MDD particularly in short clauses less than ten characters. Through the application of writer’s view, it is observed that the syntactic frequency structure exhibits self-organization, tending towards the golden section. The results yield that longer sentences are not necessarily difficult in Chinese Hua’er folk songs.
Zhang et al. (Thu,) studied this question.