Menzerath's law: Is it just regression toward the mean?

Abstract

The study revisits the Menzerath's Law, which articulates the inverse relationship between the lengthof constructs and the mean length of their constituents. This relationship is famously modelled byGabriel Altmann's model, which combines power and exponential relations. His formulas havebeen widely used to describe this relationship across linguistics and biology, however, there is nosatisfactory explanation for his model. Therefore, the paper proposes shifting our perspective toexamine directly the relationship between the number of constituents in a construct and the numberof subconstituents in the same construct. This relationship may be explained by a simple modelbased on linear regression, which leads to a hyperbolic model of the Menzerath's Law. This approachis successful for several datasets, but insufficient for others.