Each phonon mode can be split into one longitudinal and two transverse polarization branches. By extrapolating the phenomenology of lattice points to the unit cells it is seen that the total number of degrees of freedom is 3"pq" when "p" is the number of primitive cells with "q" atoms/unit cell. From these only 3p are associated with the acoustic modes, the remaining 3"p"("q" − 1) are accommodated through the optical branches. This implies that structures with larger "p" and "q" contain a greater number of optical modes and a reduced "λ"L.