The Coefficients in the Formula for the Menzerath-Altmann Law
Agnieszka Kułacka · Journal of Quantitative Linguistics · 2010
In this paper I will put forward several hypotheses regarding the coefficients in the discrete formula of the Menzerath-Altmann law (henceforth the MA law). Until now very little has been said on their interpretation in the linguistic context. I will make an attempt to close this gap. The article is divided into several sections. In the first section, I discuss the MA law and the up-to-date research on various language levels. Section 2 presents the two existing formulae: for continuous data and for discrete data. In section 3, I present past interpretations of the coefficients. Finally, in sections 4 to 6, I discuss the results of my research and some conclusions regarding the values of coefficients which appear in the discrete formula.