O prawidłowości statystycznej Yulea (uwagi polemiczne)

British statistician G. U. Yule examined sentence lengths measured with a number words (word forms) as a characteristic of a particular prose style. He found out that in a particular author's works sentences tend to become shorter with time, i.e. in texts from la[1]ter period of creative activity sentences as a rule are shorter than in texts written earlier. In order to verify this claim I have examined sentence lengths in 4o texts of contemporary Polish artistic prose authored by 15 writers (3 or, in few cases, 2 works by one author). I have analysed 200 sentences from each text. Yule's statistical regularity was corroborated only by one author's works, which makes up for 7, 1%. However, the examination has proved another relationship - the shorter period between works of a particular author, the slighter differences in sentence lengths and vice versa.