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Abstract
Drawing on methods from quantitative linguistics, this paper tests the hypothesis that the intonation unit is a valid language construct whose immediate constituent is the foot (and whose own immediate constituent is the syllable). If the hypothesis is true, then the lengths of intonation units, measured in feet, should abide by a regular and parsimonious discrete probability distribution, and the immediate constituency relationship between feet and intonation units should be further demonstrable by successfully fitting the Menzerath-Altmann equation with a negative exponent. However, out of 16 texts from the Aix-MARSEC database, only six share a common probability distribution and only eight exhibit a tolerable fit of the Menzerath-Altmann equation. A failure rate of ≥50% in both cases casts doubt on the validity of the hypothesis.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Gabriel Altmann (Bochum/Lüdenscheid) for his comments on an early draft of this paper. The data used in this study is part of the Aix-MARSEC database, version 2, courtesy of the Speech & Language Data Repository (SLDR), http://sldr.org, identifier: sldr000033.
Notes
1. Nearly all linguistic distributional laws entail 1-displaced distributions, because one cannot normally have words with zero frequency or units with zero length.
2. For example, in some studies of word-length frequencies, systematic variation in the parameters of the same probability distribution can be linked to text type (Antić, Stadlober, Grzybek, & Kelih, Citation2006).
3. Although the detailed results are not presented here on the grounds of parsimony (parameter numbers), it is worth noting that the generalized Dacey-Poisson and Dacey-Negative-Binomial distributions performed little better: in both cases, a satisfactory fit could not be achieved for nine out of the 16 texts.