Category:Length

first draft)

Length is one of the most prominent quantitative properties of linguistic units among others, such as complexity, frequency, polysemy, age, polytextuality, and homonymy.

Laws and hypotheses concerning length are based on

(1) distributional analyses in the spectral form, which represents the number of units with a given frequency. Length distributions can be analysed on data from tests or from dictionaries (with different results because in dictionaries, the units occur only once;

(2) functional interrelations such as the dependence of the length of many types of units on their frequency or the dependence of polysemy on length;

There are several linguistic units which can be investigated according to their length: sounds or phonemes (duration), syllables, morph(em)s, words, and even higher units such as syntactic constructions.

Author: R. Köhler

--Rkoehler 12:08, 6 January 2006 (CET)