Menzerath's law

The Menzerathsche law (often Menzerath - Altmann 's law) is one of the results of Quantitative Linguistics. It means that the complexity of the direct components of a linguistic unit is the complexity of the unit itself dependent

The example of the ratio of the syllables of the word, their components, they are: The length of the syllables of a word depends on the number of syllables, has the floor. That means: If one examines a large number of words, it can be shown that the length of the syllables of these words varies with the length of the words. This law applies not only to the relationship between word and syllable, but in general, even for smaller and larger linguistic units.

To develop the Menzerath Act

Already in the 19th century, it was hypothesized that the duration of the sounds of a word decreases with its length. Menzerath & de Oleza (1928 ) extended this hypothesis to the statement that with increasing number of syllables of the words the syllables themselves are on average shorter.

This yields the following hypothesis developed:

The greater the whole, the smaller the parts.

Specified on the field of linguistics:

The larger a linguistic construct, the smaller its constituents.

Altmann, Heups and Kohler showed early 80s with quantitative methods, that this postulate can also be applied to larger constructs of natural language, the larger the set, the smaller the individual subsets ( Clauses ), etc., is a prerequisite for such relationships that a relationship between units (in this case set) and their immediate constituents (in this part set) is studied. Looking at the relationship between units that are connected to each other via an intermediate level (ie: indirect constituents ), changes their relationship: the more complex the sentence, the more complex / larger the words ( intermediate level: subset / Clause ). This relation is known as Arens 's Law, named after Hans Arens, who has hired an investigation.

From the hypothesis that the change in Konstituentenlänge is proportional to the change in the construct length, and the additional assumption of a disturbance can be determined by Altmann & Schwibbe (1989: 6-7 ) the following mathematical model are derived: with the special cases ( for ) and for.

For example, depending on the Morphlängen wordlength

To check the validity of Menzerath 's law, Gerlach ( 1982) has a dictionary of the German with about 15,000 headwords fully evaluated. The fit of the model was as follows:

( Where x: number of morphs per word, n is the number of words in the dictionary with the length of x, y is the observed average length of morphology ( number of phonemes per morph), y * the length of the morph that is calculated when one adapts the specified form of the Menzerath 's law to the observed data, and the F- test showed P = 0.001 very good results can be seen very clearly that the Morphlänge decreases when the word length increases result:. ., the Menzerathsche law is for this text a good model. for detailed explanations reference is made to the literature cited. )

To name and power of the law

The Menzerathsche law is also known as Menzerath - Altmann law or Menzerath - Altmann 's Law since its mathematical formulation and generalization by Altmann (1980). It structures the language of the so-called " set units " ( Hřebíček: groups of blocks with same lexemes ) as the largest units down to the sounds / phonemes. At least for a subclass of Japanese kanji characters, this law seems also to prove.

For the validity of the law

The Menzerath - law has been proven in many studies on various linguistic phenomena in various languages. Moreover, it can also be applied in areas other than the linguistics. Thus studies performed, that the social behavior of baboon groups also corresponds to the Menzerath 's Law: The greater the entire group, the smaller are the subordinate social groups.