Menzerath's Law Research Articles

On two realizations of Menzerath's law*

Abstract According to Menzerath's law, the longer a linguistic construct the shorter its components. This paper shows that two phonetic phenomena, the “rhythmic”; law of Slovak and the “isochrony tendency”; of a variety of different languages, are merely consequences of Menzerath's law. This enables us to show that different, very disparate, phenomena can sometimes be the consequence of one single mechanism.