Law of distribution of syllable lengths

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The length of syllables can be determined differently according to the number of letters, sounds or phonemes. Especially for spoken language, the syllable length can also be measured according to how long a person needs to pronounce it, i.e. as the syllable duration . If one examines how often syllables of different lengths occur in texts for texts, one can see that they are controlled by a law of language . In principle, it is the same law of language that also affects the frequency distribution of word lengths ( law of the distribution of word lengths ; theory: Wimmer et al.) For the application of the theory to syllable lengths see

An example

An example of a syllable length distribution (measured as the number of phonemes per syllable) in a short German press release:

x n (x) NP (x)
1 5 5.02
2 82 77.88
3 98 101.47
4th 29 31.05
5 4th 3.39
6th 1 0.19

(Where x is the number of phonemes per syllable, n (x) is the number of syllables with x phonemes observed in this text; NP (x) is the number of syllables with x phonemes, which is calculated using the Conway-Maxwell Poisson distribution fits the observed data Result: the Conway-Maxwell-Poisson distribution is a good model for this text with the test criterion P = 0.59, where P is considered good if it is greater than / equal to 0.05 For more detailed explanations, please refer to the literature given.)

The syllable length distribution of this text is quite typical for German: the syllables of medium length are most common. It is noticeable that a different model has to be chosen for syllable lengths in German than for morph, sentence and word lengths or the lengths of rhythmic units.

outlook

With around 230 German, 30 English and 10 Russian texts, the Conway-Maxwell-Poisson distribution almost always proves to be a suitable model; in Old Church Slavonic as well as in the modern Bulgarian and Slovenian languages, the Hyperpoisson distribution. Studies on other languages ​​are pending; a generalization of the results is therefore not yet useful.

The findings on the syllable length distributions support the general hypothesis of quantitative linguistics that language use as well as language structure and change follow laws.

Finally, it should be noted that not only the distribution of syllables of different lengths in texts is subject to a language law. The syllable length depends on the word length: the more syllables a word has, the shorter the syllables are. This connection is well established and known as a special case of Menzerath's law .

literature

  • Sergey Andreev: Distribution of Syllables in Russian Sonnets , in: Glottometrics 41, 2018, p. 13–23 (PDF full text ).
  • Karl-Heinz Best : Syllable lengths in reports in the daily press . In: Karl-Heinz Best (editor): Frequency distributions in texts . Peust & Gutschmidt, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-933043-08-5 , pages 15-32.
  • Karl-Heinz Best: Syllable, word and morph lengths in Lichtenberg. In: Glottometrics 21, 2011, pages 1–13, (PDF full text ).
  • Karl-Heinz Best: Syllable lengths in German. In: Glottotheory 4, 2013, pp. 36–44.
  • Falk-Uwe Cassier: Syllable lengths in reports in the German daily press . In: Karl-Heinz Best (editor): Frequency distributions in texts . Peust & Gutschmidt, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-933043-08-5 , pages 33-42.
  • Ioan-Iovitz Popescu, Karl-Heinz Best, Gabriel Altmann : Unified Modeling of Length in Language . RAM-Verlag, Lüdenscheid 2014. ISBN 978-3-942303-26-2 . (Chapter "Syllable length", pages 7-10.)
  • Otto A. Rottmann: Syllable Length in Russian, Bulgarian, Old Church Slavonic and Slovene . In: Glottometrics 2, 2002, pages 87-94 (PDF full text ).
  • Peter Zörnig and others: Quantitative Insights into Syllabic Structures. RAM-Verlag, Lüdenscheid 2019. ISBN 978-3-942303-88-0 . (The total of 13 authors quantitatively record several properties of syllables, including the lengths and types of syllables in a number of languages, some of which are very different, and demonstrate their regular distributions.)
  • Maria Zuse: Syllable lengths in German and English press releases of the present. State examination thesis, Göttingen 1998.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gejza Wimmer, Gabriel Altmann: The Theory of Word Length Distribution: Some Results and Generalizations. In: Peter Schmidt (editor): Glottometrika 15. Issues in General Linguistic Theory and the Theory of Word Length . Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, Trier 1996, pages 112-133, ISBN 3-88476-228-1 ; Gejza Wimmer, Reinhard Köhler, Rüdiger Grotjahn & Gabriel Altmann: Towards a Theory of Word Length Distribution. In: Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 1, 1994, pp. 98-106.
  2. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from May 18, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / lql.uni-trier.de
  3. ↑ Falk-Uwe Cassier: Syllable lengths in reports in the German daily press . In: Karl-Heinz Best (editor): Frequency distributions in texts (pages 33–42). Göttingen: Peust & Gutschmidt, 2001, page 37, ISBN 3-933043-08-5 .
  4. ↑ Data on the dependence of the duration and length of syllables on the number of syllables of the words in three speaking styles in German can be found in: Laila Asleh, Karl-Heinz Best: To review the Menzerath-Altmann law using German (and Italian) words as an example. In: Göttingen Contributions to Linguistics 10/11, 2004/5, pages 9-19.

See also

Web links

Wiktionary: syllable length  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations