Testing the Menzerath-Altmann Law in the Sentence Level of Written Chinese

Abstract

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.