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Punctuation effects in english and esperanto texts

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  • Ausloos, M.

Abstract

A statistical physics study of punctuation effects on sentence lengths is presented for written texts: Alice in wonderland and Through a looking glass. The translation of the first text into esperanto is also considered as a test for the role of punctuation in defining a style, and for contrasting natural and artificial, but written, languages. Several log–log plots of the sentence-length–rank relationship are presented for the major punctuation marks. Different power laws are observed with characteristic exponents. The exponent can take a value much less than unity (ca. 0.50 or 0.30) depending on how a sentence is defined. The texts are also mapped into time series based on the word frequencies. The quantitative differences between the original and translated texts are very minutes, at the exponent level. It is argued that sentences seem to be more reliable than word distributions in discussing an author style.

Suggested Citation

  • Ausloos, M., 2010. "Punctuation effects in english and esperanto texts," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 389(14), pages 2835-2840.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:389:y:2010:i:14:p:2835-2840
    DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2010.02.038
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    Citations

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    Cited by:

    1. Stanisz, Tomasz & Drożdż, Stanisław & Kwapień, Jarosław, 2023. "Universal versus system-specific features of punctuation usage patterns in major Western languages," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 168(C).
    2. Vieira, Denner S. & Picoli, Sergio & Mendes, Renio S., 2018. "Robustness of sentence length measures in written texts," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 506(C), pages 749-754.
    3. Richmond, Peter & Roehner, Bertrand M., 2016. "Effect of marital status on death rates. Part 2: Transient mortality spikes," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 450(C), pages 768-784.
    4. Liu, Yang & Zhuo, Xuru & Zhou, Xiaozhu, 2024. "Multifractal analysis of Chinese literary and web novels," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 641(C).
    5. Ficcadenti, Valerio & Cerqueti, Roy & Ausloos, Marcel & Dhesi, Gurjeet, 2020. "Words ranking and Hirsch index for identifying the core of the hapaxes in political texts," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(3).
    6. Ausloos, M., 2012. "Measuring complexity with multifractals in texts. Translation effects," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 45(11), pages 1349-1357.

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