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159 LAWS AND PRINCIPLES
Verner’s Law
Verner’s Law explains some of the apparent exceptions to Grimm’s Law.
Historically, this was important because it strengthened the position of the
neogrammarians (Junggrammatiker) that sound changes operated as exceptionless
‘laws’, not just as tendencies. Verner’s Law (first published in Verner
1877) states that Germanic word-internal voiceless fricatives (many of which
had arisen through the application of Grimm’s Law) were voiced when the
stress did not fall on the immediately preceding syllable. Old English brō�ar
‘brother’ and fadar ‘father’ have different medial consonants, even though there
was a *t in the corresponding position for both in Indo-European (compare
Greek phrātēr and pater, respectively), because the Indo-European word for
‘brother’ is stressed on the first syllable, the word for ‘father’ on the second.
Wackernagel’s Law
Wackernagel (1953 [1892]) draws attention to the fact that clitics in the Indo-
European languages occur preferentially in second position in the sentence.
This is now sometimes called the Wackernagel position.
Word-Based Hypothesis
According to Aronoff (1976: 21): ‘All regular word-formation processes are
word-based. A new word is formed by applying a regular rule to an already
existing word. Both the new word and the existing one are members of major
lexical categories [defined elsewhere as noun, adjective, verb and adverb, LB.]’
Word formation, in this text, must be understood as derivational morphology,
and word must be understood as ‘lexeme’.
Zipf’s Law
Zipf formulated several laws about linguistic behaviour. The one that is usually
referred to as ‘Zipf ’s Law’ can be formulated as
r � f = C
where r is the rank of a word in a particular text (that is, its position in terms
of frequency in the text: a word which occurs 72 times has a higher rank than
one which occurs 63 times), f is its frequency of occurrence in the same text,
and C is a constant (Zipf 1949: 23–7).
Zipf (1965 [1935]: 38) states what he terms his ‘law of abbreviation’ as
follows: ‘[T]he length of a word tends to bear an inverse relationship to its