Pegah Faghiri, Kim Gerdes, Sylvain Kahane (2026). Verifying the Menzerath-Altmann law in the verbal domain in 180 languages. UDW26 @ LREC 2026.
Two-sided Fisher’s exact test, computed live from the current data. Significance markers: *** p<0.001, ** p<0.01, * p<0.05, n.s. otherwise. Numbers may differ slightly from the paper if the underlying treebank counts have changed.
| Contrast | Counts | Odds ratio | p-value | Sig. | Paper reference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MAL · NDO vs VO · "gray zone" | NDO 13/21 (62%) vs VO 26/72 (36%) | 2.88 | 0.0455 | * | §5.1 (footnote: 65% vs 36%, p<0.05) |
| MAL · NDO vs VO · "MAL preference" | NDO 6/21 (29%) vs VO 40/72 (56%) | 0.32 | 0.0460 | * | §5.1 (footnote: 25% vs 56%, p<0.05) |
| LMAL · VO vs OV · "Anti-LMAL" | VO 23/67 (34%) vs OV 4/38 (11%) | 4.44 | 0.0098 | ** | §5.1 (paper: 34% vs 11%, p<0.01) |
| RMAL · VO vs OV · "RMAL preference" | VO 61/73 (84%) vs OV 9/15 (60%) | 3.39 | 0.0721 | n.s. | §5.1 (paper: 83% vs 63%) |
| LMAL · OV vs VO · "LMAL preference" | OV 15/38 (39%) vs VO 19/67 (28%) | 1.65 | 0.2812 | n.s. | §5.1 (paper: 39% vs 29%) |
| RMAL · VO vs OV · "Anti-RMAL" | VO 3/73 (4%) vs OV 2/15 (13%) | 0.28 | 0.1998 | n.s. | §5.1 (paper: 3% vs 13%) |