The Menzerath–Altmann law: Experimenting with Tatar texts

Abstract

The Menzerath–Altmann law on the relationship between the length of linguistic units and the length of their components is one of the important laws of quantitative linguistics. This law is a result of an advanced linguistic structures organization and is of great importance for the modern theory of language aimed at revealing the relations between qualitative features and quantitative parameters of the language. The validity of the Menzerath–Altmann law has been confirmed in a number of works on languages with different morphological structures. The main purpose of this paper is empirical testing of the Menzerath–Altmann law on the Tatar language with the help of various fiction texts (both poetry and prose). The distribution of word forms in the Tatar language by length, observed values of the average syllable length depending on the word length, average values of the syllable length predicted by the model, as well as the model parameters were investigated for the analyzed texts. To assess the goodness of fitting of the model, the coefficient of determination R2, which for different texts ranged from 0.676 to 0.999, was used. It was concluded that G. Altman’s formula is in good agreement with the data of the Tatar language. The model predicts not only the decreasing average syllable length with the increasing word length (function monotonicity), but also its subsequent increasing (change in the function monotonicity) for a number of texts.

Keywords

• word length
• syllable length
• quantitative linguistics
• menzerath–altmann law
• modeling of length of linguistic units
• tatar language