Pegah Faghiri, Kim Gerdes, Sylvain Kahane (2026). Verifying the Menzerath-Altmann law in the verbal domain in 180 languages. UDW26 @ LREC 2026.
While the MAL effect captures the overall slope of the log-log regression, MAL compliance looks at consecutive transitions n→n+1 individually. A language is "MAL-compliant" at a transition when MAL_{n+1} < MAL_n.
Compliance categories (thresholds on the proportion of decreasing transitions, paper §4.2): high ≥ 2/3 (≈0.667), low ≤ 1/3 (≈0.333), otherwise middle.