Research Article
Approaching the Linguistic Complexity
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-642-02466-5_104, author={Stanisław Drożdż and Jarosław Kwapień and Adam Orczyk}, title={Approaching the Linguistic Complexity}, proceedings={Complex Sciences. First International Conference, Complex 2009, Shanghai, China, February 23-25, 2009. Revised Papers, Part 1}, proceedings_a={COMPLEX PART 1}, year={2012}, month={5}, keywords={Complexity natural language Zipf law word classes}, doi={10.1007/978-3-642-02466-5_104} }- Stanisław Drożdż
Jarosław Kwapień
Adam Orczyk
Year: 2012
Approaching the Linguistic Complexity
COMPLEX PART 1
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-02466-5_104
Abstract
We analyze the rank-frequency distributions of words in selected English and Polish texts. We compare scaling properties of these distributions in both languages. We also study a few small corpora of Polish literary texts and find that for a corpus consisting of texts written by different authors the basic scaling regime is broken more strongly than in the case of comparable corpus consisting of texts written by the same author. Similarly, for a corpus consisting of texts translated into Polish from other languages the scaling regime is broken more strongly than for a comparable corpus of native Polish texts. Moreover, based on the British National Corpus, we consider the rank-frequency distributions of the grammatically basic forms of words (lemmas) tagged with their proper part of speech. We find that these distributions do not scale if each part of speech is analyzed separately. The only part of speech that independently develops a trace of scaling is verbs.
