This paper revisits Menzerath's Law, also known as the Menzerath-Altmann Law, which models a relationship between the length of a linguistic construct and the average length of its constituents. Recent findings indicate that simple stochastic processes can display Menzerathian behaviour, though existing models fail to accurately reflect real-world data. If we adopt the basic principle that a word can change its length in both syllables and phonemes, where the correlation between these variables is not perfect and these changes are of a multiplicative nature, we get bivariate log-normal distribution. The present paper shows, that from this very simple principle, we obtain the classic Altmann model of the Menzerath-Altmann Law. If we model the joint distribution separately and independently from the marginal distributions, we can obtain an even more accurate model by using a Gaussian copula. The models are confronted with empirical data, and alternative approaches are discussed.

In the general form, such a dependence can be formulated as follows: the longer is the construct the shorter are its constituents. Later on, this fact was put in a mathematical form by Gabriel Altmann [1]. Now it is known as the Menzerath-Altmann law and is considered to be one of the general linguistic laws with evidences reaching far beyond the linguistic domain itself [2]. The mentioned relationship is studied on various levels of language units, such as syllable-word, morpheme-word, etc. While the word-sentence seems to be the most straightforward generalization on the syntactic level, it appears that in fact an intermediate unit must be introduced in this scheme [3, p. 283]. Usually, this intermediate unit are thought to be phrases or clauses, which are direct constituents of the sentence [4]. We would like to note, however, that the notion of clause is not well elaborated in Eastern European linguistic traditions [5], including Ukrainian (cf.