Menzerath’s law: Is it just regression toward the mean?

The study revisits the Menzerath’s Law, which articulates the inverse relationship between the length of constructs and the mean length of their constituents. This relationship is famously modelled by Gabriel Altmann’s model, which combines power and exponential relations. His formulas have been widely used to describe this relationship across linguistics and biology, however, there is no satisfactory explanation for his model. Therefore, the paper proposes shifting our perspective to examine directly the relationship between the number of constituents in a construct and the number of subconstituents in the same construct. This relationship may be explained by a simple model based on linear regression, which leads to a hyperbolic model of the Menzerath’s Law. This approach is successful for several datasets, but insufficient for others.