Dependency distance minimization (DDm) is a word order principle favouring the placement of syntactically related words close to each other in sentences. Massive evidence of the principle has been reported for more than a decade with the help of syntactic dependency treebanks where long sentences abound. However, it has been predicted theoretically that the principle is more likely to be beaten in short sequences by the principle of surprisal minimization (predictability maximization). Here we introduce a simple binomial test to verify such a hypothesis. In short sentences, we find anti-DDm for some languages from different families. Our analysis of the syntactic dependency structures suggests that anti-DDm is produced by star trees.

翻译：依赖性距离最小化(DDm)是一个单词顺序原则,有利于在判决中将相互接近的同义词放在彼此之间。十多年来,在依赖性综合依赖树库的帮助下,大量证据表明该原则的证据已经存在,长期刑期很多。然而,从理论上讲,人们预测该原则更有可能在短顺序上被超常最小化原则(可预见性最大化)所击败。这里我们引入一个简单的二元测试来验证这样的假设。在短短的刑期中,我们发现来自不同家庭的一些语言有抗DM。我们对合成性依赖性结构的分析表明,抗DM是由恒树产生的。