The Menzerath-Altmann Law: Challenges We Are Facing
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | The Menzerath-Altmann Law is one of the most often analyzed laws in quantitative linguistics. Hypotheses derived from this law have been tested on many languages at all linguistic levels. At first glance, it might seem that the Menzerath-Altmann Law is a well-established linguistic principle, and consequently, there are no linguistically interesting questions concerning this law. However, a deeper analysis of the results published in the past 70 years reveals some linguistically interesting issues and problems that need to be clarified and solved. First, there is no uniform way of defining the analyzed units in terms of type, token, or lemma, despite the impact of the choice of the unit on the results. Second, the majority of studies analyze only three linguistic levels (e.g., word-morpheme-phoneme), regardless of others. This approach can potentially lead to an inappropriate interpretation of the results. Third, most analyses rely on the traditional differentiation of linguistic levels, e.g., phoneme-morpheme-word-clause-sentence. However, some results show that this differentiation does not necessarily align with a differentiation that fits the Menzerath-Altmann Law. In this talk, I will briefly review all three of these issues and discuss them. |