The Menzerath-Altmann Law in Czech: From Sentence to Phoneme

The Menzerath-Altmann law describes an inverse relationship between the size of a linguistic construct and the average size of its constituents. While its validity has been widely confirmed for lower-level language units, its application to higher levels remains less explored and sometimes inconclusive. For the first time, this study not only investigates but also corroborates the validity of the Menzerath-Altmann law across a fine-grained hierarchical structure of linguistic units. In particular, the following units are considered: sentence – independent clause – clause – phrase – subphrase – chunk – word – syllable – phoneme. Using a corpus of written Czech, we confirm the validity of the law across this hierarchy.