Language
unit is a fundamental conception in modern linguistics, but the boundaries are
not clear between language levels. As language is a multi-level system,
quantification rather than microscopic grammatical analysis should be used to
investigate into this question. In this paper, Menzerath-Altmann law is used to
make out the basic language units in written Chinese in the sentence level.
Cite this paper
Chen, H. (2018). Testing the Menzerath-Altmann Law in the Sentence Level of Written Chinese. Open Access Library Journal, 5, e4747. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/oalib.1104747.
Chen, H. and Liu, H. (2016) How to Measure Word Length in Spoken and Written Chinese. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 23, 5-29. https://doi.org/10.1080/09296174.2015.1071147
Liu, H. and Cong, J. (2014) Empirical Characterization of Modern Chinese as a Multi-Level System from the Complex Network Approach. Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 42, 1-38.
Andres, J. (2010) On a Conjecture about the Fractal Structure of Language. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 17, 101-122. https://doi.org/10.1080/09296171003643189
