Abstract
Part IV thus far has examined how statistical universals might contribute to the formation of linguistic units such as words and their values. This chapter will continue to examine these units, especially in terms of the length distribution of words and compounds.
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Notes
- 1.
The procedure requires a dictionary to convert a word to a phoneme sequence. In Chap. 11, a text was transformed to phoneme sequences by using such a dictionary, but words that are not in the dictionary cannot easily be transformed into phoneme sequences.
- 2.
Note that the range of lengths on the horizontal axis is too small for a logarithmic axis to reveal any useful trend, too.
- 3.
The corresponding graph for a shuffled text is obviously identical to that for the original natural language text.
- 4.
This graph, too, is presented on semilog axes, because of Miller and Mandelbrot’s theoretical analysis and the same reason mentioned for Fig. 13.1.
- 5.
The corpus includes some long hyphenated chunks that are sometimes doubtful to be called “compounds”. Nevertheless, they are included in this analysis because they show some of the reality of hyphen usage.
References
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Tanaka-Ishii, K. (2021). Size and Frequency. In: Statistical Universals of Language. Mathematics in Mind. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59377-3_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59377-3_13
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