IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/phsmap/v360y2006i2p557-575.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Fractal power law in literary English

Author

Listed:
  • Gonçalves, L.L.
  • Gonçalves, L.B.

Abstract

We present in this paper a numerical investigation of literary texts by various well-known English writers, covering the first half of the twentieth century, based upon the results obtained through corpus analysis of the texts. A fractal power law is obtained for the lexical wealth defined as the ratio between the number of different words and the total number of words of a given text. By considering as a signature of each author the exponent and the amplitude of the power law, and the standard deviation of the lexical wealth, it is possible to discriminate works of different genres and writers and show that each writer has a very distinct signature, either considered among other literary writers or compared with writers of non-literary texts. It is also shown that, for a given author, the signature is able to discriminate between short stories and novels.

Suggested Citation

  • Gonçalves, L.L. & Gonçalves, L.B., 2006. "Fractal power law in literary English," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 360(2), pages 557-575.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:360:y:2006:i:2:p:557-575
    DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2005.06.049
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437105006850
    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/j.physa.2005.06.049?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.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Mantegna,Rosario N. & Stanley,H. Eugene, 2007. "Introduction to Econophysics," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521039871, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Bernhardsson, Sebastian & da Rocha, Luis Enrique Correa & Minnhagen, Petter, 2010. "Size-dependent word frequencies and translational invariance of books," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 389(2), pages 330-341.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Sabrina Camargo & Silvio M. Duarte Queiros & Celia Anteneodo, 2013. "Bridging stylized facts in finance and data non-stationarities," Papers 1302.3197, arXiv.org, revised May 2013.
    2. Assaf Almog & Ferry Besamusca & Mel MacMahon & Diego Garlaschelli, 2015. "Mesoscopic Community Structure of Financial Markets Revealed by Price and Sign Fluctuations," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(7), pages 1-16, July.
    3. Laleh Tafakori & Armin Pourkhanali & Riccardo Rastelli, 2022. "Measuring systemic risk and contagion in the European financial network," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 63(1), pages 345-389, July.
    4. Alves, L.G.A. & Ribeiro, H.V. & Lenzi, E.K. & Mendes, R.S., 2014. "Empirical analysis on the connection between power-law distributions and allometries for urban indicators," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 409(C), pages 175-182.
    5. Muchnik, Lev & Bunde, Armin & Havlin, Shlomo, 2009. "Long term memory in extreme returns of financial time series," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 388(19), pages 4145-4150.
    6. Zhang, Chao & Huang, Lu, 2010. "A quantum model for the stock market," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 389(24), pages 5769-5775.
    7. Michelle B Graczyk & Sílvio M Duarte Queirós, 2017. "Intraday seasonalities and nonstationarity of trading volume in financial markets: Collective features," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(7), pages 1-23, July.
    8. Kutner, Ryszard & Wysocki, Krzysztof, 1999. "Applications of statistical mechanics to non-brownian random motion," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 274(1), pages 67-84.
    9. Lee, Jae Woo & Eun Lee, Kyoung & Arne Rikvold, Per, 2006. "Multifractal behavior of the Korean stock-market index KOSPI," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 364(C), pages 355-361.
    10. Zhang, J.W. & Zhang, Y. & Kleinert, H., 2007. "Power tails of index distributions in chinese stock market," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 377(1), pages 166-172.
    11. Paulo Ferreira & Éder J.A.L. Pereira & Hernane B.B. Pereira, 2020. "From Big Data to Econophysics and Its Use to Explain Complex Phenomena," JRFM, MDPI, vol. 13(7), pages 1-10, July.
    12. Liviu-Adrian Cotfas, 2012. "A quantum mechanical model for the rate of return," Papers 1211.1938, arXiv.org.
    13. Chakrabarti, Anindya S., 2015. "Stochastic Lotka-Volterra equations: A model of lagged diffusion of technology in an interconnected world," IIMA Working Papers WP2015-08-05, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, Research and Publication Department.
    14. David Vidal-Tomás & Simone Alfarano, 2020. "An agent-based early warning indicator for financial market instability," Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination, Springer;Society for Economic Science with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents, vol. 15(1), pages 49-87, January.
    15. Demidov, Denis & Frahm, Klaus M. & Shepelyansky, Dima L., 2020. "What is the central bank of Wikipedia?," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 542(C).
    16. Choi, Jaehyung, 2012. "Spontaneous symmetry breaking of arbitrage," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 391(11), pages 3206-3218.
    17. J. Doyne Farmer, 2002. "Market force, ecology and evolution," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 11(5), pages 895-953, November.
    18. Joachim Kaldasch, 2015. "Dynamic Model of the Price Dispersion of Homogeneous Goods," Papers 1509.01216, arXiv.org.
    19. Gianni Degasperi & Luca Erzegovesi, 1999. "I mercati finanziari come sistemi complessi: il modello di Vaga," Alea Tech Reports 007, Department of Computer and Management Sciences, University of Trento, Italy, revised 14 Jun 2008.
    20. Wang, Guochao & Zheng, Shenzhou & Wang, Jun, 2019. "Complex and composite entropy fluctuation behaviors of statistical physics interacting financial model," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 517(C), pages 97-113.

    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:360:y:2006:i:2:p:557-575. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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.