The Menzerath-Altmann Law from a Physical Perspective: The Case of Written Chinese Characters

Abstract

Previous studies have explored the validity of the Menzerath-Altmann law in spoken languages from a physical perspective. It has been found that this law fits better when the length of the constituents is measured in physical units, i.e. acoustic time durations. We hypothesize that it may also apply to written languages. To investigate this hypothesis, this study intends to explore the validity of the Menzerath-Altmann law at the character level in written Chinese from both symbolic (i.e. measured in strokes) and physical (i.e. measured in writing time durations) perspectives. The findings reveal a significant negative correlation between the character length and the average component length, aligning with the Menzerath’s law. The results from both measurement approaches show that their relationship conforms to the Menzerath-Altmann law. More importantly, the law can be better fitted when the length of components is measured in physical units (i.e. writing time durations), which indicates a physical basis of the linguistic law. These findings may have significant implications for structural regularities within written linguistic systems. However, it should be noted the generalizability of this study may be limited since it only investigates one linguistic law, focusing on a limited set of character types in one language.