Próba statystycznej weryfikacji prawa językowego Behaghela
An attempt at statistical verification of Behaghel’s linguistic law

Summary/Abstract: In 1909, in reliance of linguistic material coming from a few dozens of world’s languages, Otto Behaghel formulated a law which he called "the law of increasing terms". It says that an order of constituents in fixed phrases containing equal elements is subject to a certain regularity, the shorter constituent precedes the longer one in general (their length is determined by the number of syllables). Quantitative verification of the law involves comparison of the frequency ratio between equal variant structures in which the two constituents of a different length (measured in syllables) are inverted, e.g. "ból i cierpienie" (‘pain and suffering’) — "cierpienie i ból","ład i porządek" (‘law and order’) — "porządek i ład", "sacrum i profanum" (‘the sacred and the profane’) — "profanum i sacrum", "treść i forma" (‘form and content’) — "forma i treść". Calculations were made based on the material excerpted from the National Corpus of Polish. All the sixteen pairs of combinations show the prevailing word order: a shorter noun — a longer noun. The effect of Behaghel’s law on linear arrangements of constituents is in all likelihood a result of euphonic reasons — structures with a shorter element going first are easier to pronounce and can be remembered easier, as felt by the Polish language users.

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