Figure 11.

Menzerath–Altmann Law: BG versus words. Relation between BG size (measured in number of words) versus the mean size of those words. The mean size of words can be expressed in terms of mean time duration (main panel), mean number of phonemes (upper right panel) or mean number of characters (lower left panel). Each grey point represents one BG, whereas blue circles are the mean duration of BGs (for exposition purposes, a linear binning has further been applied to smooth out the data and reveal the emergence of two different MAL regimes; equivalent plots without this additional binning are reported in the electronic supplementary material). Red dotted line is a fit to MAL (equation (3.8)). The law clearly holds only when constituent size is measured in physical units (table 3).