Parameter interpretation of the Menzerath law: evidence from Serbian

The law-like relation between word and syllable length as part of the Menzerath law has been corrobated empirically in many different languages. As to South Slavic languages, we have the studies by Gajić (1950) and Grzybek (1999) on Croatian, and by Grzybek (2000) on Slovene. The aim of the present paper is first of all to provide empirical evidence of the Menzerath law for another South Slavic language, namely Serbian, distinguishing different text sorts in our analysis. Second, a linguistic interpretation of the usually iteratively derived parameters of the Menzerath law is offered. Furthermore it will be shown that some parameters of the Menzerath law can be replaced by empirically obtainable quantitative features.