The Co-Effect of Menzerath-Altmann Law and Heavy Constituent Shift in Natural Languages
Résumé
The present paper tries to link the Menzerath-Altmann law (MAL) to the
Heavy Constituent Shift (HCS) phenomenon and discuss their co-effect in human
natural languages. We deduce a hypothesis based on MAL and HCS and then try to
empirically verify it by investigating multiple language data from Surface-Syntactic
Universal Dependencies (SUD). Our results show that the hypothesis is valid across
the complete set of typologically diverse languages and the co-effect of MAL and
HCS appears to be a very regular universal