IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/phsmap/v300y2001i3p567-578.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Beyond the Zipf–Mandelbrot law in quantitative linguistics

Author

Listed:
  • Montemurro, Marcelo A.

Abstract

In this paper the Zipf–Mandelbrot law is revisited in the context of linguistics. Despite its widespread popularity the Zipf–Mandelbrot law can only describe the statistical behaviour of a rather restricted fraction of the total number of words contained in some given corpus. In particular, we focus our attention on the important deviations that become statistically relevant as larger corpora are considered and that ultimately could be understood as salient features of the underlying complex process of language generation. Finally, it is shown that all the different observed regimes can be accurately encompassed within a single mathematical framework recently introduced by C. Tsallis.

Suggested Citation

  • Montemurro, Marcelo A., 2001. "Beyond the Zipf–Mandelbrot law in quantitative linguistics," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 300(3), pages 567-578.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:300:y:2001:i:3:p:567-578
    DOI: 10.1016/S0378-4371(01)00355-7
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437101003557
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/S0378-4371(01)00355-7?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ferrer i Cancho, Ramon, 2005. "Decoding least effort and scaling in signal frequency distributions," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 345(1), pages 275-284.
    2. Tunnicliffe, Martin & Hunter, Gordon, 2022. "Random sampling of the Zipf–Mandelbrot distribution as a representation of vocabulary growth," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 608(P1).
    3. Miśkiewicz, Janusz & Ausloos, Marcel, 2008. "Correlation measure to detect time series distances, whence economy globalization," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 387(26), pages 6584-6594.
    4. Yan, Xiaoyong & Minnhagen, Petter, 2016. "Randomness versus specifics for word-frequency distributions," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 444(C), pages 828-837.
    5. Yan, Xiaoyong & Minnhagen, Petter, 2018. "The dependence of frequency distributions on multiple meanings of words, codes and signs," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 490(C), pages 554-564.
    6. Lambiotte, R. & Ausloos, M. & Thelwall, M., 2007. "Word statistics in Blogs and RSS feeds: Towards empirical universal evidence," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 1(4), pages 277-286.
    7. Ghosh, Dipak & Chakraborty, Sayantan & Samanta, Shukla, 2019. "Study of translational effect in Tagore’s Gitanjali using Chaos based Multifractal analysis technique," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 523(C), pages 1343-1354.
    8. Bar-Ilan, Judit, 2008. "Informetrics at the beginning of the 21st century—A review," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 2(1), pages 1-52.
    9. Young, D.S., 2013. "Approximate tolerance limits for Zipf–Mandelbrot distributions," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 392(7), pages 1702-1711.
    10. Rotundo, Giulia, 2014. "Black–Scholes–Schrödinger–Zipf–Mandelbrot model framework for improving a study of the coauthor core score," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 404(C), pages 296-301.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Zipf–Mandelbrot law; Human language;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:300:y:2001:i:3:p:567-578. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/physica-a-statistical-mechpplications/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.