Optimization of morpheme length

A cross-linguistic assessment of Zipf’s and Menzerath’s laws

Bibliographic Data

ID21226728
AuthorsMatthew Stave (0000-0002-8590-8856, Lyon 1 Université, corresponding author), Ludger Paschen (0000-0001-7176-8576, Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics), François Pellegrino (0000-0002-6456-1953, Lyon 1 Université), Frank Seifart (0000-0001-9909-2088, Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics)
Year2021
Volume7
Issues3
Publication date2021-04-21
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueLinguistics Vanguard (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2199-174X • E-ISSN: 2199-174X
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/lingvan-2019-0076
OpenAlexW3157851553
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited14

Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation and Menzerath’s Law both make predictions about the length of linguistic units, based on corpus frequency and the length of the carrier unit. Each contributes to the efficiency of languages: for Zipf, units are more likely to be reduced when they are highly predictable, due to their frequency; for Menzerath, units are more likely to be reduced when there are more sub-units to contribute to the structural information of the carrier unit. However, it remains unclear how the two laws work together in determining unit length at a given level of linguistic structure. We examine this question regarding the length of morphemes in spoken corpora of nine typologically diverse languages drawn from the DoReCo corpus, showing that Zipf’s Law is a stronger predictor, but that the two laws interact with one another. We also explore how this is affected by specific typological characteristics, such as morphological complexity

Linguistics · Morpheme · Natural language processing · Political science · Statistics · Zipf's law · Authorship Attribution and Profiling · Computer Science · Language and cultural evolution · Law · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Mathematics · Philosophy

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