About the construction of lines in the MS

[pfeaster]

In the case you mention,it must be that words starting with sh are more likely to occur after a longer word than a shorter one.  

I did a simulation of this effect by creating two token streams....

That's an interesting conjecture, but I believe we could test it more directly than via simulation.

If it's true that words starting with [Sh] are more likely to occur after longer words than shorter ones, then -- in the absence of meaningful line-based patterning -- we should see this effect elsewhere too.  If we were to exclude the beginnings and ends of lines from consideration and calculate the average length of mid-line words that precede words starting with [Sh], it should differ significantly from the norm.

Anyone care to check this, either just for Q20 or more generally?