Menzerath’s law: what it is and how it describes communication.

A law of linguistics that seems to hold true in both humans and other animals.

Have you ever heard of linguistic laws? Broadly speaking, we can say that they are laws that establish how language works, and how it is structured. Two of the most important ones, in human language, are: Menzerath's Law (or Menzerath-Altmann's Law) and Zipf's Law of brevity.

On the other hand, we have seen how these laws can also be applied to communication between primates, for example through their gestures and cries. In this article we will focus on Menzerath's Law of Menzerathand we will tell you what science says about it, based on three studies that relate communication between primates to these two laws.

Menzerath's law: what is it and what does it establish?

Menzerath's Law, also called the Menzerath-Altmann Law (after its discoverers, Paul Menzerath and Gabriel Altmann) is a linguistic law, which holds that, the longer a sentence (or linguistic construct) is, the shorter its constituents are (and vice versa). (and vice versa).

This law also extends to words; thus, the longer a word is, the shorter its syllables or morphemes are (and vice versa; the shorter the word is, the longer its syllables are). In other words, according to this law the longer language units are made up of shorter components..

This law was first described by Paul Menzerath in 1954. The contributions of Paul Menzerath, a Slovak linguist, gave impetus to research in quantitative linguistics. Thus, his findings were generalized to this branch of linguistics.

Later, Menzerath's Law was reformulated by Gabriel Altmann (1980 and 1984), also a Slovak linguist, so that it ended up being called Menzerath-Altmann's Law.

The linguistic laws: Menzerath and Zipf

Linguistics is the scientific discipline responsible for the study of the origin, evolution and structure of language.. From it are born the linguistic laws, which are those that govern language.

But... how do linguistic laws arise? It is the scholars of language (specifically, quantitative linguists) who do this work, and produce these laws, based on different formal models.

Formal models, in turn, are based on the parameters and components of the language (namely four: phonetics, semantics, morphology and syntax). Finally, these laws are observed in all languages (i.e., they are "universal", regardless of the language).

The two laws that predominate in all human languages are: the aforementioned Menzerath's Law, and Zipf's Law of brevity. In addition, these two laws have also been found to govern the communication of a small number of primate species. In this article we will mention (and explain) two recent studies that speak to this.

However, it is not so clear whether, in addition, these two laws also affect, in the case of primates, their long-distance vocal communication.

Study: the gestures of chimpanzees.

According to a 2019 study conducted by a team of British scientists and published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society Bwhere they analyzed chimpanzee gestures, these are subject to Menzerath's Law, i.e., the same law that governs human speech.

Thus, according to this study, the gestures used by chimpanzees, in order to communicate with each other, follow the same laws that govern human speech. This study, specifically, focused on two laws: Zipf's Law of Contraction and Menzerath's Law.

The first, Zipf's Law, states that the length of a word is inversely proportional to the frequency with which the word is used (i.e., the longer the word, the less it is used, and vice versa). The second, that of Menzerath, has already been explained.

Thus, roughly speaking, what this study reveals is that the language of monkeys and humans follows the same rules.

Methodology: the gestures of chimpanzees

Following their purpose, to discover whether chimpanzee gestures obey the same laws as those governing our language, the scientists in the study analyzed a total of 359 communication clips from up to 48 different chimpanzees.

Through these 359 clips, they identified a total of 2,137 different gestures, which in turn, were divided into 58 types of gestures.

After analyzing all these gestures, they observed how 873 of them constituted separate units, while the rest constituted clusters of gestures (between 2 and 45 per cluster).

Results

Regarding the two laws studied, Zipf's Law of contraction and Menzerath's Law, they observed that the first one was not confirmed; however, they did observe an inverse relationship between the duration of the gesture and its frequency of use in the case of a subgroup of shorter gestures.

As for the second law, Menzerath's Law, the researchers observed that the communicative gestures of chimpanzees did obey this law, that is, the law was fulfilled.

Thus, the conclusion reached by the researchers of this study was the following: chimpanzee gestural communication is subject (partially) to the laws that govern natural human languages, as is in this case the Law of the Gestural Language.as is in this case Menzerath's Law.

The authors also added in their conclusions the importance of continuing to study these evolutionary communication patterns.

More studies: other primate species

Another study, also from 2019, and which also alludes to Menzerath's Law, establishes that the morning cries of a primate family, the gibbons (Hylobatidae), follow this lawas well as another one: Zipf's law of brevity (already mentioned in the previous study).

Thus, as the researchers observed in this study, the longer sequences of their cries are composed of shorter calls, on average.

Finally, alluding to another study, this time developed by the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, a team of scientists verified that Menzerath's Law also holds true in a species of Ethiopian primates, called geladas (Theropithecus gelada).

In this species, males emit quite long sequences of calls (specifically, 25 calls consisting of 6 different types of sequences).

Bibliographical references:

• Gabriel, A. (1980). Prolegomena to Menzerath's law. Glottometrika 2: pp. 1-10.
• Heesen, R., Hobaiter, C., Ferrer-i-Cancho, R. & Semple, S. (2019). Linguistic laws in chimpanzee gestural communication. The Royal Society Collection. Biological Sciences.
• Hernández-Fernández, A. (2014). The laws of linguistics in communication systems. Tesis Doctoral, Universitat de Barcelona.
• Huanga, M., Ma, H., Ma, Ch., Garber, P.A. & Fan, P. (2019). Male gibbon loud morning calls conform to Zipf's law of brevity and Menzerath's law: insights into the origin of human language. Animal Behaviour, ScienceDirect.
• Wentian, L. (2012). Menzerath's law at the gene-exon level in the human genome. Complexity 17 (4): 49-53.