Is Menzerath's Law a consequence of segment inventory inhomogeneity?

Abstract

This paper shows that measuring text properties on an inhomogeneous collection of texts can yield incorrect relations between the measured text properties, or new false relations can even emerge. The possibility that Menzerath's Law can be explained by the inner inhomogeneity of the segment inventory is subsequently discussed.

Keywords

• Quantitative linguistice
• Corpus linguistics
• False relations
• Inventory inhomogeneity
• Menzerath‘s law