Abstrakt
According to the Menzerath-Altmann law, there is a relation between the size of the whole and the mean size of its parts. The va-lidity of the law was demonstrated on rela-tions between several language units, e.g., the longer a word, the shorter the syllables the word consists of.
In this paper it is shown that the law is valid also in syntactic depend-ency structure in Czech. In particular, longer clauses tend to be composed of shorter phrases (the size of a phrase is measured by the number of words it consists of).